I posted a journal to the wrong account. How do I correct it? Journal entries guide

“I posted a journal to the wrong account. How do I correct it?” Leave the original alone and post a new correction journal in the same period that debits the right account and credits the wrong one for the same amount (Step 7); if the wrong journal came from a document such as an invoice, correct the document instead, because its journal follows it (Step 8).

You are the accounts person closing the books for March 2026 at GadgetSphere, and your finance manager has three manual journals on your plate before month-end. The work tonight is the monthly rent accrual, the monthly depreciation for the new branch fit-outs, and one correction for a journal posted to the wrong account last week. By the end of this guide you will have posted a balanced manual journal, cloned a recurring one, and corrected a mistake. Budget about 10 minutes per journal once the pattern clicks.

Tonight’s journals, at a glance

1. Check the period is open to journals. LOCK_GL and LOCK_ALL refuse them; LOCK_TXN does not (Before you start).
2. Key the rent accrual: header date and reference, balanced lines, a branch on every line. A line with no branch saves and drops out of every per-branch report (Step 1 and Steps 2 to 4).
3. Create it. There is no draft: Create puts it straight in the ledger (Step 5).
4. Clone last month’s depreciation, then change its date first. The clone is live at once under the old date, and the period lock is not checked on a clone (Step 6).
5. Correct a misposting with a new journal in the same period, debiting the right account and crediting the wrong one, once the original has been on a report; a misposting from a document is corrected on the document (Step 7).
6. Remove or reverse a mistake. The listing’s VOID deletes the journal and writes no reversal, so tick manual journals one by one: the select-all box ticks the automatic ones too. Once a journal has been reported, reverse it by clone and swap (Step 8).
7. Check Error Checking. Know that Missing Journal’s Create first deletes every journal linked to the document; map the missing code before you press it (Step 9).

    flowchart TD
  W["A journal entry is wrong"] --> D{"Did a document<br/>post it?"}
  D -->|"yes"| DOC["Correct the document<br/>a credit note, or void the voucher<br/>its journal follows it"]
  D -->|"no, a manual journal"| R{"Has it been<br/>on a report?"}
  R -->|"not yet"| U["UPDATE it in place<br/>or VOID: a soft delete,<br/>no reversal written"]
  R -->|"yes"| C["A new correction journal<br/>in the same period,<br/>or clone and swap to reverse"]
  

Tonight’s work runs across three pages: Step 1 is on this one, Steps 2 to 5 (the rent accrual) are on Key the accrual and create it, and Steps 6 to 9 (the clone, the correction, removing a mistake and the final check) are on Clone, correct and check.

Meet GadgetSphere

GadgetSphere Sdn Bhd runs 22 consumer-electronics branches across Klang Valley, Penang, Johor Bahru, Kota Kinabalu and Kuching. Almost every transaction in BigLedger has already posted automatically this month: roughly 10,000 sales invoices from the branches, around 2,100 purchase invoices from authorised distributors, the daily point-of-sale cash bills and the supplier payments. What is left for you tonight is the small set of entries that nothing upstream can generate on its own: an accrual for rent the landlords have not yet invoiced, a depreciation charge calculated by the fixed-asset schedule, and a fix for one line that landed in the wrong cost-of-sales account last Tuesday.

Concepts you will use tonight

• Manual journal entry (the form is called Journal Transaction) - a balanced set of debits and credits you type in yourself. Everything else in BigLedger posts automatically the moment a sales invoice, purchase invoice or cash bill is finalised.
• Correcting a journal - a manual journal stays editable after you create it: open it, change a line (its GL Code, amount or branch) and press UPDATE, which stays greyed out until debits equal credits again. That rewrites the entry in place, so a report already run on it will no longer agree with the ledger. Once a journal has been seen on a report, correct it with a new journal instead, so the original and the fix both stay on record.
• Reversal - to cancel the effect of a journal that has already been seen on a report, you clone it and swap every debit and credit, so the two net to zero and both stay on record.
• The VOID button on the journal listing - despite its label, this is not a document void and writes nothing reversing. It removes the ticked manual journals outright (a soft delete), which is fine for something you keyed a minute ago and nobody has reported on.
• Clone - copies an existing journal’s accounts, amounts and descriptions into a new one. Perfect for the rent accrual and the depreciation entry you will post every month. The clone is created and live immediately, so always change the date first.

Before you start

• Your chart of accounts is built and the accounts you intend to debit and credit are active. If you migrated recently, see the Chart of Accounts Setup Guide.
• The March 2026 fiscal period is still OPEN in Chart of Account > Fiscal Year. A period at LOCK_GL or LOCK_ALL refuses manual journals (the message is The selected date falls within a locked fiscal period); LOCK_TXN only stops operational documents, so a manual journal still goes in.
• Your user has the journal create permission for company GS and the branches you will post to. Roles are whatever your administrator named them; what matters is that the permission is targeted at the right company and branches, otherwise the branch dropdown on the Lines tab will be missing the branches you need.
• You know the rent accrual amount (RM 38,500 for 22 branches in March, split RM 1,750 per branch), the depreciation amount (RM 12,500 for the new Klang Valley branch fit-outs, from each asset’s depreciation schedule in the Fixed Asset applet), and which two accounts the misposted line should have hit instead.
• Default company, ledger and currency are set under Settings so the new-journal form fills itself in. Optional, but saves you four clicks per entry.

Step 1: Open the journal list and start a new entry

Finance > Ledger and Journal Applet > Journal Transaction > New

Open the Ledger and Journal Applet from the left sidebar and click Journal Transaction. You land on a long list of every journal posted this month. Most of them carry a Document Type and Document No (INTERNAL_SALES_INVOICE, INTERNAL_PAYMENT_VOUCHER and so on) - those are the ones the sales, purchase and point-of-sale applets posted for you, and they are read-only. The handful you need to add tonight will have no document behind them; that blank Document Type column is how you tell a manual journal from an automatic one.

Use the date filter to narrow the list to March 2026 so you can see what you already have. To start the rent accrual, click the New button at the top right. The form has two tabs: Main (the header information for the whole journal) and Lines (the actual debits and credits). You will fill them in that order.

If the form opens with Company already set to GS, Ledger set to Primary and Currency set to MYR (Malaysian Ringgit), your default selections are working - one less thing to think about per entry. If those fields are blank, set them now: pick GS for GadgetSphere Sdn Bhd, the Primary ledger, and MYR.

Watch out for: if clicking New does nothing or shows a permissions message, your user does not hold the journal create permission. Ask your administrator to grant it — it is targeted by company and branch, so check that GS and the branches you post to are on it.

Next: Steps 2 to 5, key the rent accrual and create it.

What success looks like

Open Journal Transaction and filter the listing to Date in March 2026. Among the automatic journals you should find exactly three rows with a blank Document Type: JV-2026-03-RENT (RM 38,500), JV-2026-03-DEPN (RM 12,500) and JV-2026-03-CORR (RM 4,200). Open Error Checking then Journal Not Balance and confirm the list is empty for March. If both checks pass, your March manual journals are complete and ready for the financial reports.

Common mistakes

A Create button that stays greyed out is in the common mistakes of Steps 2 to 5; a clone left on last month’s date and VOID pressed expecting a reversing entry are in those of Steps 6 to 9.

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