The General Ledger (GL) is at the heart of CUFS, collating information from the sub-ledgers of all the University’s financial transactions. The GL is used for processing journals, account enquiries and running reports. 

It is the responsibility of Budget holders to ensure that expenditure has been correctly coded and that all goods and services have been provided (evidence retained).

Review of manual journals

Institutions should ensure that manually posted journals have undergone the required segregated duty review. We recommend maintaining a journals log detailing the preparer, approver and the rationale for each journal. Supporting evidence is required to be retained for each journal, this is useful for query resolution and for providing evidence to audit.

Accruals and Prepayments

Accruals and prepayments can be used when preparing your institution accounts to reflect your financial position more accurately and to monitor your final position.

At present, Institutions are not expected to accrue their income/expenditure until the year end, however if the amounts are material (i.e., over £10,000), they must be processed monthly. Advice is available from your School team or the General Ledger helpdesk [1].

General Ledger (GL) checklist 

Pre-GL Close

• Process or delete any un-posted GL journals.
• Review, reconcile and clear appropriately any institution suspense accounts.
• Journal or transfer expenditure to match to correct source of funds.
• Correct any miscoded GL transactions.
• Ensure Non-Recurrent grants are not overspent by reviewing expenditure.
• Ensure that Trust Fund postings are accurate and monitor level of expenditure.
• Process journals for Deposit Account movements.

Post-GL Close

• Run the Cognos GL Budget to Actual report or Transaction Code Balances reports to review the institution’s transactions and balances. For detailed guidance, refer to the Finance Training webpage on GL Reporting [2].
• Review the Institution’s Summary Report distributed by the Finance Division on the sixth working day. This is available from Cognos Reporting for institutions to run themselves.
• Distribute relevant reports to budget holders.

Latest version 21 December 2024