Month-end is almost here. Before the figures go out, you run through the general ledger one more time. Is everything in the right place, are entries booked to the right account, are there any odd spikes? Not complicated work in itself, but it easily costs you a morning: exporting, sorting, comparing with last month, and starting over the moment something changes. Sound familiar? In this post, Thomas Werkhoven, director of Exsion365 and still a controller at heart, shows how he checks his general ledger in Excel, without the hassle.

Where the general ledger check gets stuck

Every controller does it: running through the general ledger before the close. You want to know whether entries sit on the right account, whether an account suddenly comes out much higher than last month, and whether anything is off.

The problem is not the checking itself. It is the gathering. You export a ledger overview, paste it into Excel, pull up last month's figures and line them up. The moment an entry comes in, you can start again. So you spend more time setting the figures up than looking at what is actually going on.

Why the standard does not always cut it

In Business Central itself you can view ledger entries, but that means clicking from account to entries to the underlying postings, screen after screen. Putting two periods side by side or comparing several companies is not straightforward. Every export is a snapshot you can run again the next day.

That is why many controllers reach for Excel. They lay out the figures the way they want to see them, with the comparisons that make sense to them. The only downside of the old way is that those figures arrive in Excel by hand, so they go stale quickly.

How I check my general ledger in Exsion

The main check for me is the figure review. I put this month next to last month, the budget and last year. In Exsion I pick the new period, press refresh, and exactly those comparisons are ready. No export, no pasting.

Conditional formatting flags any deviation that does not make sense straight away. So I can see at a glance whether this month's depreciation is booked, whether an accrual is right, or whether an amount suddenly steps out of line. If something stands out, I drill down to the underlying posting, all the way to the invoice.

After that I run through a few balance sheet and suspense accounts. Does the payroll tax I pay this month match last month's return? Do the bank balances reconcile? If something changes in Business Central, I refresh with one click and everything is up to date again.

What it gives you

A concrete example: a tax entry that ended up on the wrong general ledger account. I spotted it straight away in the overview, because the account differed from the month before. Without that comparison, I would only have found it once the figures were already out.

I also set up a few checks before the ledger check itself. Are all banks up to date, are all contracts invoiced? A simple marker, a smiley for instance, shows me whether my administration is in order before I start. That leaves fewer errors for the check itself.

The biggest gain is in failure costs. You get the report right once, in the right order, instead of fixing things afterwards. You check instead of gather, and you keep time for the question that really matters: why does this differ?

Try it yourself

Want to see how this works for your own general ledger checks? You can try Exsion free for 60 days. We build your first report together, so you see straight away how it works for your setup. More than 20,000 users already work with their Business Central data this way.

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