page forty-nine

The Ledger

Forty-eight rooms measured, tuned and weighed things, and none of them ever had to balance. Today's number opens a merchant's counting house in a Georgian town on the last day of the month. Every sum in the ledger was written twice, once on each side, and the trial balance still does not agree. Find out why before the evening mail.

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The trial balance

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The waste book

The book every sum was copied from, in the hand of whoever made the bargain. It is right. Reading an entry aloud against the ledger takes two clerks twelve minutes.

    The ledger
    House
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    The arrow keys walk to other days. Every day is a different house, trade, month and clerk.

    What is real here and what is not

    Double entry, the trial balance, the clerk's slips and the old tests for them are real. The houses, their customers and their trade are the day's number.

    1. 01

      Everything twice

      A Georgian merchant kept a waste book of each day's bargains, and a clerk posted every one of them into the ledger twice: once to the debit of the account that received, once to the credit of the account that gave. Each posting names the other account in its narrative (“To Cash”, “By Goods sold”) and carries the folio of the entry, so the two halves can always find each other.

    2. 02

      The trial balance

      Because every sum went in once on each side, the debit balances of all the accounts must add to the same total as the credit balances. When they do not, something was posted wrongly. When they do, it proves less than it seems: a right sum in the wrong customer's account, or an entry left out on both sides, balances perfectly.

    3. 03

      The bookkeeper's tests

      Clerks learned to read the difference. A sum posted to the wrong side throws the balance out by twice itself, so look for a posting worth half the difference. A half never posted throws it out by exactly itself. Two figures transposed (64 for 46) or slid a column (70 for 7) leave a difference that divides by nine. The page does the adding; the reading is yours.

    4. 04

      What the page simplifies

      Each entry here is a single debit and a single credit, with no discounts, interest or compound entries, and the clerk has cast every account correctly, though miscasting was the commonest slip of all. Goods bought and sold are kept in two accounts where many houses kept one mixed goods account, and calling over is charged at a flat twelve minutes an entry, however long the entry is.

    Forty-nine rooms, and one number doing all the work. Today it writes every sum twice, lets a tired clerk slip, and asks you to find where without being able to read the whole book again.