The objective of a departmental accounts is to ascertain the

Departmental accounts split a business's trading results into separate sections for each department, so that the sales, cost of sales, and expenses of each department are recorded and reported individually rather than being merged into a single overall figure.

The main reason for doing this is to find out how well each department is actually doing, that is, to ascertain departmental performance: which departments are generating strong profit margins, which ones are barely breaking even, and which ones may need corrective action such as better pricing, cost control, or even closure. Management can only make these decisions if the results are broken down by department rather than lumped together.

Labour turnover, stock levels, and staff numbers may all be tracked as part of running a department, but none of them is the core purpose of preparing departmental accounts. Those figures belong to human resource or stock-control records; departmental accounts exist specifically to measure and compare financial performance across departments.

Examination reminder: whenever a question asks about the objective of segmenting accounts (by department, by branch, or by product line), the underlying reason is almost always to evaluate performance and support internal decision-making, not to track operational statistics.