Subsidiary ledger

A subsidiary ledger is the breakdown of a control account. The receivables balance is a single line on the trial balance, while underneath it every customer account, and under each account every invoice, receipt, credit note and journal transfer, sits as its own row with a date, a document type and number, a description, a debit or credit amount and a running balance. It is a supporting record kept alongside the statutory books, but it is where day-to-day work actually happens, because it is the only view that reaches individual documents. Every accounting package and ERP produces it, though rarely under a name a group reporting pack would recognise: what you would ask for as a subsidiary ledger is requested locally as a cari hesap ekstresi, the counterparty account statement, or a hesap hareket dökümü, the account movement report. Asking a Turkish finance team for the subsidiary ledger of an account will usually get you one of those two reports.

Reconciliation happens at this level. The statement your counterparty sends is their subsidiary ledger, and you compare the two lists on document number, date and amount. That comparison produces four outcomes: lines present and agreeing on both sides, lines present on both sides with different amounts, lines only you have, and lines only they have. The total difference is simply the arithmetic of those four buckets. Without the detail, reconciliation collapses into checking whether two totals happen to be equal. iFinances brings these lines together with bank statement lines and e-invoice data in one table, and both routes for getting the data out of your system are ready and chosen with you during setup: upload the standard Excel or CSV export, or use the direct connection the system itself offers.

Two things are regularly confused. The first is treating a subsidiary ledger as an open item list. The subsidiary ledger lists all movements in the period in date order, including those already settled; an open item list shows only invoices and payments still outstanding. Both roll up to the same balance, but the row counts and the way you read them are entirely different. The second is the opening balance. It is easy to pull a date-ranged extract that omits the brought-forward figure, and such an extract will never agree with a counterparty statement, sending you hunting for a difference that was never in the transactions at all.