Print Ledger

Your accountant may want a complete print out of all your accounts to be able to prepare your tax returns. Using this facility you can create a text file of all the details of your accounts.

A text file is produced instead of printing directly to your printer because of the probable size of the output and because you will probably want to control the final format of the printed output using your Word Processor. You could waste an awful lot of time and paper if the output went directly to your printer. You will see the program carrying out a lot of activity when you start this function.

In addition to being able to select all or any sections of your accounts, eg Income or Expenditure, you can select the other items needed for a complete audit trail:

The Journal to identify all transfers made between accounts.

The list of any Unposted Items. This should be empty!

The list of all Split Items. This will let anyone working from the printed ledger to identify where individual amounts have been posted from a single composite amount.

Only those accounts which have had any activity during the year will be printed. This will match up with the list of accounts in your Trial Balance.

You have the option to select the printing orientation - Portrait or Landscape. When printing in Portrait orientation, the transaction descriptions may be truncated to fit the paper width.

At the end of printing your ledger, the program displays a dialog telling you the name of the text file where all the information is stored in simple text lines. The text file itself is opened in a separate window.

If you use your Word Processor software to view this file, you can adjust the orientation, font and margin sizes to best fit your printer, and to be able to print only those sections you may need. (Don't forget that you can print out any specific account or report directly from the program at any time)

The default font is Courier since it is a non-proportional font which is easiest for maintaining the columns of figures.

The program sets the number of lines according to information picked up from the currently defined printer in Windows. Each page of the printed accounts in the text file is the same length.

You will find that by setting the font in your Word Processor to 8 point, and by changing my top and bottom page margins, you can quickly align the printer page endings with the account page endings, also leaving space for any appropriate headers and footers on each page.