General Ledger maintains

In business and financial accounting, "maintenance" refers to keeping records up to date with current financial transactions. A business must update its financial records as it incurs expenses and takes in revenue to ensure that its officers know how much money the company has, how much it spends and how much it earns in profits. Ledger maintenance refers to updating financial records called ledgers, which are simply records of the money a company spends and earns.

he general ledger forms a pivotal part of the financial records. The general ledger captures where income and expenditure is incurred within the business and ultimately helps provide information to assist in management decisions, leading to better control of the business.

The general ledger contains a debit and credit entry for every transaction recorded within it, so that the total of all debit balances in the general ledger should always match the total of all credit balances. If they do not match, the general ledger is said to be out of balance, and must be corrected before reliable financial statements can be compiled from it.

The general ledger is comprised of all the individual accounts needed to record the assets, liabilities, equity, revenue, expense, gain, and loss transactions of a business. In most cases, detailed transactions are recorded directly in these general ledger accounts. In some cases where the volume of transactions would overwhelm the record keeping in the general ledger, transactions are shunted off to a subsidiary ledger, from which just the account totals are recorded in a control account in the general ledger. In the latter case, a person researching an issue in the financial statements must refer back to the subsidiary ledger to find information about the original transaction.