Analysis columns, totalling and cross-casting

Why the columns are there at all

An analysis column is a labour-saving device with a checking device built into it.

The labour saving: instead of posting forty separate cash sales to the Sales account in the ledger, you add the Sales column once and post a single figure. Forty postings become one.

The checking device is the part most students miss. Because every line in a cash journal has the same debit (Bank in the CRJ) or the same credit (Bank in the CPJ), the analysis columns between them must, added together, come back to the Bank total. If they do not, you know there is a mistake, and you know it before you carry the error into the ledger where it is much harder to find.

Two different additions

Casting means adding a column downwards to get its total. You cast the Bank column, the Sales column, the Sundry column, and so on.

Cross-casting means adding those column totals across the totals row and checking that they equal the Bank total. It is a horizontal check on a set of vertical additions.

Do them in that order, and do the cross-cast every single month before you post anything.

The column that does not join in

In a business that buys and resells goods, the CRJ carries a Cost of sales column next to the Sales column. Every cash sale creates two separate double entries:

• Bank is debited and Sales is credited with the selling price;
• Cost of sales is debited and Trading stock is credited with what those goods cost the business.

The second entry never touched the bank account. No money moved for it. So the Cost of sales column is not part of the cross-cast. Leave it out of the horizontal check and post it on its own.

Grade 10 marks are lost here more than almost anywhere else.

Worked example. Naledi Dlamini runs a fresh produce shop in Soweto. Her CRJ for April, after casting, shows:

Cross-cast the columns that represent money into the bank: 12 400 + 3 600 + 7 000 = 23 000. That equals the Bank total, so the casting is sound.

Now notice what was deliberately excluded. Cost of sales of R7 750 was not added in. If you had included it you would have got R30 750 and concluded, wrongly, that R7 750 had gone missing. The cost of sales figure records goods leaving the storeroom, not money entering the bank.

The Sundry total of R7 000 is made up of rent income R2 000 and an extra capital contribution of R5 000 from Naledi. Those two are posted individually to their own ledger accounts, because a Sundry total is a mixture of unrelated accounts and posting it as one figure would be meaningless.

Core checkpoint: you can cast a set of journal columns, run the cross-cast, state which columns take part in it and which do not, and explain what an unequal cross-cast tells you about where the error is.