What a general ledger is
A general ledger is the central accounting record of a business. Every financial transaction, whether a sale, a payment, a payroll run or a depreciation charge, is posted to the ledger against an account in the chart of accounts. The ledger is the single place where the full financial history of the organisation accumulates, and it is the source from which the financial statements are produced.
Because everything posts to the ledger, its accuracy underpins everything downstream. The profit and loss, the balance sheet and the reports a finance team relies on are all views of the ledger. The work of keeping it right is mostly about getting transactions into it correctly and on time: categorised to the right account, dated correctly, and reconciled against the bank. When transactions arrive late or in the wrong shape, the reports built on the ledger are late or wrong too.
The general ledger in the Cohiva platform
Cohiva Crunch is a full-stack ERP with AI financial intelligence. It provides real-time profit and loss, a 13-week cash forecast and multi-entity consolidation across a shared chart of accounts. Transaction data flows natively from Complex into Crunch, so the activity recorded at a venue reaches the ledger without a manual export to run.
For mid-market finance teams consolidating across several entities, that means the ledger reflects what happened across the operation today rather than after a reconciliation. To see how it works, explore Crunch.