POSTING MEDIA 1. Definition of posting media.—Posting media have been previously defined as the books in which a preparatory assignment of debts and credits is made for every business transaction. The journal with its subdivisions is the posting medium in modern ac counting systems. Any book, no matter what its form, in which a transaction is expressed as a debit and a credit, and is accompanied by a description of the nature of the transaction itself, is a posting medium. It is good accounting to vary the form of the posting media, provided the form adopted will be the means of saving time. Closely allied with the question re garding posting media is that in regard to the form of ledger to which the posting shall be made. The functions of the ledger and of the posting media are complementary, and the form of the one depends, in part at least, upon the form of the other.
It has already been shown that the use of con trolling accounts is made possible by dividing the journal into sections and then posting in total from these sections to the controlling accounts. At the same time, many transactions must be posted individ ually to the controlling account and to the subsidiary accounts, even when separate cash, sales and purchase books are used. If controlling accounts are to be operated efficiently, nearly all postings to them must be made in total. Consequently, one is faced with the problem of grouping these transactions within the original book without increasing the number of books used.
2. Columnar posting media.—The plan by which transactions may be classified without the use of ad ditional books is that of providing separate columns in the books used, each column representing either charges or credits to a single account. By thus divid ing the books into sections, the same result is obtained as if the items of each column were written in a sepa rate book. The total of each column becomes the total debit or credit to a single account from that post ing medium for the month.
To refer again to the illustration of a feed store the owner may wish to know the amount of the sales of each commodity. For this purpose, instead of hav
ing a general merchandise purchase account and a general merchandise sales account, it is necessary, to keep accounts with purchases and sales—thus : pur chases of hay, purchases of oats, sales of hay, and sales of oats.
3. Specialized purchase book.—Therefore, the pur chase book for such a business might well take the form given below. The first entry in each column of the book illustrated here refers to an imaginary bal ance brought forward from a supposed preceding page.
On March 28, the business purchased on credit from J. Austin a certain quantity of oats. The in voices, which are numbered consecutively, give. all necessary details regarding this purchase. action is entered in the purchase book; a note is made of the date, the name of the creditor, the invoice num ber, the amount to be credited to his account and the charge to "purchase of oats." The invoice value of these oats was $500, which, since it is the amount owed to Austin, is entered in the amount-credited column; a credit of that amount to Austin's account is indicated. Since a specialized purchase book is used, with a sepa rate column for each account that is frequently af fected, the charge to "purchase of oats" is shown by entering $500 in the column headed "oat purchases." In a similar way, the transaction with Jones involves the purchase of oats, hay and corn. It is recorded in the purchase book by entering the cost of each commodity in the column recording its purchase.
There are some articles, however, which will be pur chased infrequently, such as harnesses, trucks, fixtures and the like. To devote a separate money column to each of these would effect no saving. A sundries column, therefore, is provided in which to record all purchases of such a nature. The name of each ac count to be charged will be entered either in the ex planation column, next to the name of the creditor, or next to the sundries column. Every transaction in dicated in this column will be posted individually to the account affected.