What is accounting journal? Accounting journal is a record of financial transactions. People or accountants are usually fill it with double-entry bookkeeping system. It means, they need to write every transactions twice. One in debit column and one in credit column. It is a system founded by Pacioli in year 1300. Its objective is to ease people to generate and audit their financial statements. These are several accounting journal templates you can use to help you managing your financial transactions.
In the beginning, there is only one accounting journal, general journal, to record all financial transactions. Then, business are growing. Business owners feel not comfortable to write and read a long list of transactions. Also, it add more tasks for accountants who work on stores and factories to group similar accounts for inventory and production purposes. That’s the reason you will see journal with specific names, like cash journal. Formats for those specific journals are similar with general journal. The differences are on their contents.
Before the raise of computer era, accountants wrote all financial transactions in a book. Then, they will filter and sum all similar categories in general ledger. After that, they can start creating financial statements with the help of trial balance table. Now, computers have taken those filter and calculation parts. Accountants don’t have to do general ledger and trial balance things to generate financial statements. There are many accounting software that can help them to generate financial statements automatically. Or, they can use spreadsheet processor, like Microsoft Excel to help them. Even now, people with no knowledge of accounting can create financial statements just by entering their data into accounting software. Quickbooks and MYOB are several famous names in accounting software.
But, accountants might need a more conservative product to help them doing the accountant way. Here are some accounting journal templates they can use to do that in accounting way.
General Journal Template
Like its name, general journal is a journal to put all general transactions. In service companies, it is a book for all financial transactions. In merchandising and manufacturing companies, its function is only to record any transactions that are not parts of special journals entries.
Special Journal Template
Sales, purchase and cash journal are top three special journals you can find in any accounting bookkeeping. Sales journal acts as a journal to record sales transactions, mostly receivable transactions. Purchase journal function is similar with sales journal, except it is used to record purchase transactions. Cash journal to write all cash transactions.
Adjusting Journal Template
What is adjusting journal? Why is it needed? If you are an accountant, then you already know the answer. Accountant need this journal to adjust transactions in general and special journal. What kind of transactions? Prepaid revenue, prepaid expenses, depreciation are some of transactions that need to be adjusted. The reason is to make balance sheet and income statements distributed properly. Format of adjusting journal template is similar with other journals. It has debit and credit columns for entering data with double-entry bookkeeping approach.
General, special and adjusting journals are part of journals you can see in general ledger and trial balance table. Accountants see this to analyze and audit transactions quickly before generating financial statements.
Closing Journal Template
Closing journal might be less needed now. If you are still using a note book or a writing book, you need this to move net profit/loss into owner’s equity accounts.
Reversing Journal Template
Similar with closing journal, you don’t need this journal in computer era.
Below, you can download and use general and special journal templates. They are parts of integrated Excel Accounting Templates.
