Ledgers reflect accounting conventions. The balance on your "revenue" account has meaning only insofar as it reflects your definition of revenue. In turn, your definition of revenue will reflect your compliance with your GAAP (for example, International Accounting Standards/International Financial Reporting Standards (IAS/IFRS) or United States GAAP), your statutory and regulatory obligations, and perhaps your transaction tax regulation mandates.

We make it easy to construct meaningful balances by posting to the accounts according to easily articulated and controlled rules that are applied to each subledger transaction. The rules are set up in Oracle Subledger Accounting and are assigned to individual ledgers. Groups of rules can be managed in sets that we call "Accounting Methods". For those situations where you must comply with both local regulation and a parent GAAP, the rules engine allows you to account for a business transaction using different conventions. This support can be tailored to the complexity of the situation, from automatic adjusting entries in the same ledger through completely populated secondary ledgers.

For example, by using two ledgers with the appropriate conventions, a French firm with a subsidiary in the United States (US), can automatically create local bookkeeping in accordance with US principles (in the US primary ledger), but also simultaneously
maintain accounting for the same transactions in accordance with French regulations (in a French secondary ledger).