General Ledger
The heart of your books — chart of accounts, journal entries, control accounts, FX revaluations, fiscal periods, and the period-close checklist.
The General Ledger is where every posted document ultimately lands. Invoices, bills, receipts, payments, depreciation — they all become balanced ledger entries here, which is why your reports always add up: there’s only one set of books, and this is it.
All of these screens live under General Ledger in the Finance sidebar.
Shape Your Chart of Accounts
Open Chart of Accounts. Horizon provisioned a working starter chart when Finance was activated — assets, liabilities, equity, income, and expenses, ready to post to.
Add accounts as your business demands them; retire ones you don’t use.
Use Account Groups to arrange accounts into rollups of your own. Note that the Profit & Loss and Balance Sheet do not follow these — those two subtotal by account type and subtype, which you don’t configure.
Post a Manual Journal Entry
Most entries come from documents — invoices, bills, payments — but sometimes you need to write to the ledger directly: accruals, corrections, opening balances. (Converting from another system? Bringing your existing books is the complete method — conversion date, opening trial balance as one journal entry, open AR/AP as real documents, and the tie-out that proves it.)
Open Journal Entries and create one: date, memo, and lines.
Every entry must balance — Horizon refuses to post debits that don’t equal credits, so an unbalanced entry can’t exist in your books.
Select Post. Need to undo one later? Reverse posts the mirror entry, visibly — history is never rewritten.
Keep Subledgers Honest — Control Accounts
Control Accounts map each subledger to its ledger account: receivables to the AR control account, payables to AP, and so on. Horizon maps these when Finance is activated, by matching account names in your starter chart. That provisioning is best-effort rather than guaranteed — if a mapping is missing, posting stops with a message telling you to set it here, rather than posting somewhere wrong. You’ll rarely visit this screen — but when your accountant asks how AR ties to the GL, this is the answer.
Revalue Foreign-Currency Balances
If you hold balances in more than one currency, open FX Revaluations at period end to restate them at current rates. The revaluation posts as a proper ledger entry — the gain or loss is in your books, not in a side spreadsheet.
Understand Fiscal Periods
Fiscal Periods shows your year divided into posting periods. A period holds one of five states — future, open, soft close, hard close, locked — and only open accepts posting from everyone. Soft close is the review state: it refuses ordinary postings but lets someone holding the right permission post the adjusting entry a review turns up. See Periods and the close.
Close the Month
Open Period Close — the close checklist for the period: tasks, owners, and evidence links, so month-end is a process you run, not a scramble you survive.
Work the list. Attach evidence where it matters — the reconciliation you finished, the accrual you posted.
When everything’s ticked, close the period. It locks: nothing posts into a month you’ve signed off, and your statements for that period are final.
Closing isn’t a leap of faith — check the Trial Balance first. Debits equal credits on every account, always; if something looks off, drill from the balance to the documents behind it.
Screens in This Area
| Screen | What it’s for |
|---|---|
| Journal Entries | Direct, balanced writes to the ledger |
| Chart of Accounts | Every account you post to |
| Account Groups | Account rollups of your own |
| Control Accounts | Subledger ↔ ledger mapping |
| FX Revaluations | Period-end restatement of foreign-currency balances |
| Fiscal Periods | Open and closed posting periods |
| Period Close | The month-end checklist: tasks, owners, evidence, lock |