AI Tutor
If a supermarket recorded every single box of cereal sold directly into its main financial accounts, the ledger would crash under thousands of pages of clutter.
Accountants solve this chaos with a two-track system: books of prime entry list daily transactions in chronological order, and the general ledger holds the official double-entry accounts.
How do we split individual customer tracking from the double-entry totals without doing double the work?

The Three-Ledger System

To keep accounts organized, businesses maintain three separate ledgers rather than dumping everything into one book.
The sales ledger contains personal accounts for each credit customer, while the purchases ledger holds personal accounts for each credit supplier.
The general ledger (or nominal ledger) holds all double-entry accounts, including income, expenses, assets, liabilities, and master control accounts that summarize total customer and supplier balances.
Let's see step-by-step how credit sales move from the day book into these accounts.

Posting the Sales Day Book

The Sales Day Book lists every credit sale invoice issued during the period.
First, you post each individual line entry to the debit side of that specific customer's account in the sales ledger to record their personal debt.