Well... no, not exactly. The general ledger also contains two special accounts relating to the above, called control accounts.
Note that the entries in the control accounts of "total sales", "total purchases" as well as "bank" come from the relevant
accounting journals.
For example, the "total sales" figure of $16,300 in the debtors control account above comes from the total in the sales journal below (which shows sales on credit).
Let’s take debtors. For debtors, we compare the closing balance of the debtors control account in the general ledger to the total of all the closing balances of all the individual debtor accounts in the debtors ledger. As you can see above, the debtors control account has a closing balance of $10,700. The debtor T-accounts come to the same figure ($8,000 + $1,400 + $1,300 = $10,700).
If the debtor T-accounts came to a different figure – let's say $11,000 – we would know for sure that there was some error, either in one of the individual debtor accounts in the debtors ledger or in the debtors control account (general ledger).
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[Balances at 31 January 2009:
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Creditors control account...........................$25,200
...
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