It is a royal pain, when auditing an account visually (such as through 2-4 General Ledger), to have to drill down into every single entry looking for something that you took the trouble to correctly document at the detail level when making the original entry in 1-3. If the line-item descriptions showed up on the reports, it would be obvious. Also, most companies I know of have internal conventions for journal numbering and often descriptions (for consistency), so one currently ends up staring at a list of 52 weekly entries for the year with identical descriptions and unrelated values, having just been told by a staff member that a particular one of them needs to be changed and knowing that there is no direct way to find it. To boot, the nature of an individual line in an entry is sometimes very different from the character of the entry itself ('exceptions'), so pulling an exception report and having only the 'general' descriptions on it brings appropriate questions from management and causes double-work researching and documenting what was already documented correctly. It really begs the question of what the point was of documenting it correctly at the line-item level to begin with.

by: Bob T. | over a year ago | General Ledger