Hi Doreen,

There is no way that I know of to look up the department by description from the journal entry screen in the Ledger. However, if you have lanpaks, you can open a second instance of Ledger on another screen and have the Edit>Departments window open and use the F6 key to look up by description using the smart finder.

It's not much better than having a printed listing in front of you unless you have a lot of departments. The same thing would apply if you were keying in AP. Have the GL open on another screen with the Edit>departments window open to search using the F6 key.

If you don't have Lanpaks free, you could go to Edit>departments and use the excel direct button to put the departments in a spreadsheet and use the filters or Find function in Excel to search the list on another screen while doing entries.

Of course, these options only work well if you have a second screen.