General journal is a miscellaneous accounting journal used by businesses to record transactions that do not fit into any of their specialized journals such as a sales journal. Accounting journals are what businesses use to document all of the day-to-day inflows and outflows of the business to be used later in the ledger. Typically, businesses only create individualized journals for topics that will receive a lot of entries, and the others are all grouped into the general journal. The general journal allows the items to be aggregated together to be used in the general ledger. The generally accepted principles of accounting (GAAP) dictate how businesses can use general journals to fulfill their accounting requirements.
[Last updated in January of 2022 by the Wex Definitions Team]
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