Control Accounts

A business may owe, and be owed, money by hundreds of different people. Checking every single customer and supplier account by hand whenever the books go wrong would take days. A control account solves this by summarising a whole ledger in one place: the sales ledger control account mirrors every credit customer, and the purchases ledger control account mirrors every credit supplier. Its closing balance should equal the total of all the individual accounts it controls, so it acts as a fast, independent check on the arithmetic.

In this lesson you will learn what control accounts are for, where their figures come from, and how to draw up both the sales ledger and the purchases ledger control account including the trickier items: cash discounts, returns, irrecoverable debts, dishonoured cheques, interest on overdue accounts, contra entries and refunds. You will also see why the figures must come from the books of prime entry, and how digital recording is changing the role of these accounts.