General Ledger

Many organizations use a general ledger (often abbreviated as GL) when recording transactions to associate various organizational accounts using double-sided entries, which provide the accounting department with general ledger entries that contain details of credits, debits, expenses, and liabilities associated with financial transactions.

Dayforce isn’t an accounting application and doesn’t generate accounting statements. Instead, account numbers, which comprise ledger codes and journal numbers, are configured in the application, and payroll transactions are associated with these codes for each payroll run. A list of transactions and their associated codes are then exported and entered into whatever accounting application that your organization uses. The same codes used in Dayforce are used by your accounting application to track account balances and generate financial statements in your accounting application.

Fundamentally, general ledger information contains transaction details that include the following two components:

A ledger code that represents the cost center or classification (or cost string) associated with each transaction
A journal number that represents the account (or line item) affected by the transaction

Taken together, the ledger code and journal number are component parts of the general ledger account numbers. These are displayed in the Account Numbers tab in Payroll Setup > General Ledger. See GL Account Numbers.

Using general ledger functionality in Dayforce begins with associating your organization’s general ledger journal account numbers with earnings and deductions. Additional information is available in General Ledger Journal Numbers.

After you have associated general ledger journal numbers with earnings and deductions, you can configure those general ledger journal numbers for use with pay groups and tax authorities for legal entities. These configurations can be used by the application to automatically reconcile credits and debits in the general ledger when recording entries for earnings, deductions, pay groups, and so forth.

You can include overrides for line item segments such as pay group, journal number, or work location in general ledger configurations. You can also configure general ledger accrual and allocation groupings based on labor, jurisdiction, or weekly allocations.

After you have configured the general ledger to your organization's requirements, general ledger information will become available in the GL Preview tab in the Employee Preview slide-out panel in the Payroll feature. General ledger information will also become available for export using the Payroll GL Export background job, which uses the export definition contained in the Payroll GL Export Specification.

Payroll General Ledger Export

After you have configured your general ledger settings, you can configure the Payroll GL Export Definition for each pay group that has a general ledger configuration associated with it, which you then use to run, or schedule to run, a background job that generates the general ledger export.

General ledger configuration is done in Payroll Setup > General Ledger.

To use general ledger functionality in Dayforce, you must associate your organization’s general ledger journal account numbers with earnings and deductions in Payroll Setup > Earnings and Deductions (using the Debit Journal Number and Credit Journal Number fields in the Earnings tab and the Deductions tab). It is strongly recommended that you include an XREF code for the earning or deduction in the Reference Code field. You can read detailed information about the options in each of these feature areas in the following topics:

This following list contains topics that describe the set up required to support exporting general ledger information: