The general ledger (GL) is the master record that holds every transaction, grouped by ledger account — cash, sales, purchases, a particular customer, and so on. In double-entry accounting, each posting updates the GL, and the financial statements are derived from it.
A “posted” general ledger means transactions are committed to the books rather than left as drafts, giving an auditable, reliable trail.
Transactions reach the ledger through day books: the sales register, purchase register, cash and bank books each capture their own class of documents, and every entry is posted from there to the ledger accounts it touches. Each account then shows an opening balance, the period's debits and credits, and a closing balance. Larger books add control accounts — a single sundry debtors account whose balance must equal the sum of all individual customer ledgers.
Follow one transaction through. A credit sale of ₹10,000 debits the customer's ledger account and credits sales; when the customer pays, bank is debited and the customer's account credited, returning it to nil. At any moment, that account tells the full story — what was billed, what was received, what remains due. Multiply this by every account and the ledger becomes the single place where any figure in any report can be traced to its source.
Ledger discipline is mostly hygiene. Postings drift into near-duplicate accounts, suspense balances sit unresolved for months, and entries get backdated into periods whose GST returns are already filed — each of these erodes the audit trail. The working habit that prevents it is monthly ledger scrutiny: scanning each account for odd balances, wrong-side entries and misclassifications before returns are filed, rather than reconstructing the year at closing time.