General ledger

The general ledger (GL) is the central accounting record of an organisation, holding every posted financial transaction grouped by account in the chart of accounts. Every other module in an ERP — sales, purchasing, inventory, fixed assets, payroll, projects — ultimately writes to the GL through posting groups, so the GL is the single source of truth for the financial statements. In Business Central and Dynamics 365 Finance, GL entries are immutable once posted and are paired with dimensions for analysis. Period close, reconciliations, and statutory reporting all run against the GL.

In practice, a subsidiary ledger — the customer ledger, the vendor ledger, the fixed-asset ledger — holds the transaction-level detail (which invoice, which asset), while the GL holds only the summarised account-level postings those sub-ledgers generate. This is why an accountant reconciles the customer ledger's total to the GL's receivables account balance rather than the other way round: the sub-ledger is the detailed source, the GL is the aggregated destination, and the two should always agree if posting groups are configured correctly.

Where confusion shows up: because GL entries are immutable once posted, correcting a mistake means posting a reversing or correcting entry, not editing the original — this is a deliberate audit-trail design, not a limitation, and it's the reason every serious ERP (Business Central and Finance and Operations included) refuses to let even an administrator edit a posted GL entry directly. Dimensions are what make the GL analytically useful beyond the chart of accounts alone; without a sensible dimension design, the GL still balances correctly but can't answer "which department, which project" without expanding the chart of accounts itself, which is the trap a good dimensions design exists to avoid.