Subsidiary Books are those books of unique entry in which transactions of comparable nature are recorded at one place and in sequential order. In an immense apprehension, recording of all transactions in one Journal and posting them into a variety of ledger accounts will be very hard and involve a lot of accounting work.
For a business having a huge number of transactions it is almost not possible to write all transactions in one journal, because of the following limitations.
- Periodical details of a few significant business transactions cannot be known, from the journal with no trouble, e.g., monthly sales, monthly purchases.
- Such a system does not make easy the installation of an internal check organism since the journal can be handled by only one person.
- The journal becomes large and voluminous.
This is avoided by sub-dividing the journal into a variety of subsidiary journals or books. The subdivisions of journal into a variety of subsidiary journals for recording transactions of comparable nature are called as ‘Subsidiary Books.’
