gptip42day - General Journal Posting SmartList

As we're nearing the end of the Fiscal Year for many companies, one of the reports external auditors ask for is a listing of all general journal entries posted for the year, who posted them and when they were posted, primarily to see if entries were posted during non-business hours.  Unfortunately, if you're using GP9 or a previous version, the options for this type of report are rather limited unless you're using GP's Audit Trails or a 3rd party audit tool.  This is because the GL tables in these versions don't contain a date/time stamp field.  This shortcoming is corrected in GP10.

So, how do we satisfy the audit requirements?  Use the Account Transactions SmartList, filter for Financial Transactions, and add the following Columns -

-  User Who Posted

-  Originating Posted Date

-  Reference

The 'User Who Posted' field, of course, lists the user ID who posted the transaction.  The 'Originating Posted Date' reflects the system date on the user's workstation on the date the transaction was posted.  This isn't quite as good as a date/time stamp because if a user really wants to game the system, they can change the system date on their PC or the GP user date before posting the transaction, thereby reflecting a bogus posting date.

The 'Reference' field reflects the general journal description, which is usually meaningful in describing why an entry was made.  (By the way, use the Note fields to provide detailed support for your journal entries!)

Although this solution isn't ideal, in most cases auditors will sign off on it, if for no other reason than it's about as good as it gets in terms of JE audit trails without the aforementioned audit trail tools.