268 



THE POPULAR EDUCATOR. 



(2) 



LESSONS IN BOOKKEEPING. XXIX. 

 ACCOUNT SALES BOOK (continued). 



(2) 



ACCOUNT SALES of 12 Tierces of Coffee (W. S. & Co.) received per the Wellington, Captain Browne, from Berbice, and sold 



on account of John Henderson of that place. 



London, 30th November, 1881. 



White, Smith, and Co. 



ACCOUNT CUKKENT BOOK. 



A Running or Current Account is an account of the mercantile 

 transactions, principally in money, bills, and sales of con- 

 signments, between two parties who have agreed to allow a 

 settlement to lie over for a limited period. Accounts Current 

 are kept mostly by agents against their principals ; and it is 

 usual to charge or to allow interest on the different sums 

 entered to the debit and credit of the parties. Besides inte- 

 rest, a commission, commonly per cent., is charged by the 

 agent on the amount of his payments and acceptances. In 

 any account current, where a sum falls due at a date beyond 

 that to which the account is made up, the interest for the 

 time must be entered as a discount on the opposite side of 

 the interest account, in order that the whole of the balance 

 of the account may be considered as due at that date. This 

 book may be journalised in the same manner as the pre- 

 ceding books. In the following examples, taken from the 

 transactions between White, Smith, & Co. and two of their 

 principals abroad viz., Nathan Herschell, Barbadoes, and 

 John Henderson, Berbice the Accounts Current are made 

 up to the 30th of June, 1882, that is, six months beyond the 

 last date of the transactions in the memoranda. We have 

 thus extended the date of the making-up of the Accounts 

 Current between the company and its principals, because in 

 the memoranda no notice was taken of such transactions, and 

 because the dates up to the 31st of December, 1881. would 

 have been rather short to show distinctly the nature of such 

 accounts. In these accounts we have not charged the com- 

 mission above mentioned, because commission was charged 



on various sums previously, and because the charging of the 

 same would seem to make the subject too complex to the 

 student. Still it is an easy matter for the intelligent stu- 

 dent to make out the Accounts Current according to the 

 rule stated above, the principal difficulty being the manner 

 of calculating the interest. In these accounts we have sup- 

 posed the rate of interest allowed and charged to be 5 per 

 cent, per annum for both principal and agent, and we have 

 shown in the products' column the mode of calculating this 

 interest, according to the following rule : Multiply the principal 

 by the number of days and by double of the rate per cent. ; 

 then divide by 73,000, and the quotient is the interest required. 

 The student will notice that the products in this column 

 are obtained by multiplying each sum by the number of 

 days opposite to it, neglecting the shillings and pence when 

 below ten shillings, and reckoning the same equal to an 

 additional pound when above ten shillings, a practice very 

 common in many counting-houses where much business is 

 done. The student may, if he pleases, multiply the exact 

 sums by the exact number of days as given in the days' 

 column, and he will most likely find, on calculating the 

 interest to a nicety, that the difference is upon the whole 

 very small, or, perhaps, none at all, owing to a balance of 

 small errors in the whole amount. In cases where " Interest 

 Books" are at hand, the actual sums due for interest may 

 be put down in the products' columns instead of the products 

 themselves, and a balance struck, as we have done ; but it 

 will most likely be found that the trouble, even with an 

 "Interest Book," is nearly th same as by the method wa 

 have adopted. # 



