5 Ways to Make an Effective Journal

How To Do Entries In a Journal?

03 Sep 2020 5260 views 6 minutes

A journal entry is simply the summary of all the debits and the credits done in a business. It is essential not only for businessmen, but also for the accounting students during the academic tenure. Because nowadays, professors mostly assign journal as an accounting assignment to them. They know that doing it effectively will not only be useful to get good marks, but also be beneficial if they run a business in the future as it enables to sort out all the issues regarding any transaction.

However, because of its complexity, most of the students get an unpleasant feeling after hearing the name of journals. If you’re one of them, then you should know that writing a journal can be interesting if it is done properly.

And for that, our academic writers have enlisted a few ways to make your journal more precise and accurate. But before that, you need to know about a few important terms used in a journal, such as:

Some Important Terms Used In a Journal:

Journal Entry - Entries that are recorded in a journal.
Journalizing - Process of making those entries in the journal.
Opening Entry - It is the first entry that is done in the journal.
Ledger - It is the book that contains all the ledger accounts.
Posting - Process of transferring all the entries to the ledger account.

So, understanding these essential terms will make your work easy. Now that you’re familiar with the above terms, let’s have a look at a few ways that can make your journal more accurate.

Tips to Know Before Doing Journal Entry:

1. Reflect Your Day

The very first step that is needed the most is to remind all the transactions that are done throughout the day. For that, you can close your eyes and try to remember all the deals done on that particular day. This will help you include all the important data.

2. Set a Schedule

Make a schedule for yourself. You can do it by allocating an amount of time up to which you can write, like for 15-20 minutes. This will help you stay focused and save you from getting carried away.

3. Keep Yourself Focused

Every journal writing requires a few minutes of complete focus to avoid the mistakes. And for that, you can use various means to improve your concentration, such as soft music, candles, or whatever suits you.

4. Date Every Entry

This is the most crucial step when you’re writing a journal as it will keep your everyday transactions in chronological order according to the date.

5. Re-read and Add Additional Thoughts

Once you have finished writing your journal entries, you should go back and do a thorough reading. This will help you add more information if you’ve missed to mention it before. And if not, then you can make the final calculations.

So, these were a few crucial tips that are necessary to follow if you want to do precise and accurate entries in the journal. Apart from following these tips, you should understand why a journal holds so much importance. And to understand it, you need to know the basic characteristics of a Journal.

Characteristics of a Journal:

It contains everyday transactions.
It arranges all the transactions in chronological order.
All the entries of the transactions are firstly recorded here and then to a ledger.
It bifurcates all the transactions into debit and credit according to their nature.
It shows the complete detail of all the transactions in one entry.

Till now, you must have understood that how a journal plays a vital role in the academic career of accounting students as well as in running a business. So, the next time when you’re asked to write a journal by your professor, these key tips will undoubtedly help you write an effective journal.

However, because of several other reasons, such as lack of time or knowledge of the subject you may fail to complete your journal on time. If you come across such an issue, then you can take help from our accounting experts who offer assignment help in Australia.