The general ledger (GL) holds every posted journal entry line, account by account. Subledgers such as accounts payable, accounts receivable and job cost hold the detail (each bill, each invoice, each cost line); the GL holds the totals those details roll up to. Financial statements, the trial balance and most surety and bank reporting read from it.
In construction, each GL line usually also carries dimensions: the project, cost code and cost type, sometimes the vendor, equipment unit or department. That lets the same ledger answer “what did the company earn” and “what did job 24-118 cost in concrete”.
Why it matters
If the GL and the project numbers sit in different systems, they drift. The controller’s job cost report and the PM’s budget disagree, and month-end turns into reconciliation instead of review.
Worked example
Riverside Medical Center Pay App #9 (sample data) posts one entry to the GL: Dr Accounts Receivable $2,079,360, Dr Retainage Receivable $231,040, Cr Contract Revenue $2,310,400, all tagged to project 24-118. The AR aging, the retainage report and the job’s billed-to-date all read those same lines.
Common mistakes
- Posting summaries to the GL and keeping the job detail somewhere else, so nothing drills.
- Editing posted entries instead of reversing them.
- Letting manual entries hit control accounts, so subledgers stop tying out.
How os.construction handles it
Accounting in os.construction (in preview) is a construction general ledger on the same records your project team uses. Posted entries are append-only, every line keeps its source document, and the subledgers are checked against the GL every night. See General ledger and journal entries.