SYSTEM OF ACCOUNTING FOR COOPERATIVE ASSOCIATIONS. 3 
deterioration may set in, and an allowance may have to be made 
before the consignee is willing to accept the shipment. Demurrage, 
switching, and extra icing charges ma} r accrue in transit, and these 
must be deducted from the selling price. Fluctuations in market 
conditions may change the selling price even after the shipment has 
gone forward. Again, cars may be sent out to commission houses to 
be handled on consignment, while others may be sent to the auctions 
in the various cities. In these cases the net proceeds derived from 
any particular shipment will not be known until the account of sales 
has been received. To take care of all these contingencies, a system 
of accounts devised for a cooperative organization which markets 
deciduous fruits and produce must be very flexible, and the record 
of sales must be kept in memorandum form until the transaction is 
consummated. 
Many of the systems now in use are built around a form generally 
known as the sales book. In this book each sale is journalized, a 
column being provided for charges to customers' accounts on one 
side, and on the other side a column for credits to the growers' 
accounts, for commission and for brokerage due, the journal entry 
being : 
Dr. Purchaser $700. 00 
Cr. To Growers $650. 75 
Commission 34. 25 
Broker 15. 00 
The charges to the accounts of the purchasers are posted in detail 
during the month, but the growers' accounts and the commission 
account are not credited with the net proceeds until payment is 
received for the shipments. In order to establish the equality of the 
two sides of the trial balance at the end of the month, the unpaid 
items would have to be taken into consideration. Or the posting to 
the ledger is carried out as follows : 
Dr. Purchaser $700. 00 
Cr. To Fruit $700. 00 
Dr. Fruit $700. 00 
Cr. To Growers 665. 00 
Commission 35. 00 
These entries make a trial balance possible at the end of the first 
month, but to obtain a balance at the end of the second month all 
items recorded during the previous month but paid during the second 
necessarily would have to be taken into account in order to obtain a 
balance. 
These systems are found, therefore, to be entirely too rigid for use 
in the handling of highly perishable products where provision must 
be made for so many contingencies. The changes on the sales book 
are made necessarily by interlineations, and in some instances these 
entries are so confusing as to be impossible of translation. Since it 
is difficult to obtain a trial balance at the end of each month, as a 
