Contact Sub-Ledger
A busy delivery business signs up thousands of customers. Without a sub-ledger, each credit customer gets their own head in the chart of accounts — and after two years the chart has 4,000 heads, the trial balance takes minutes to load, and finding a real account among the customer leaves is archaeology.
The contact sub-ledger is the standard accounting answer: one control account, detail underneath.
What changes when it's on
- Customer and supplier postings go to a single control head — Customer Receivable or Supplier Payable — with the specific contact recorded on each ledger line.
- New contacts stop getting their own account heads. The chart of accounts stays the size your accountant designed.
- The per-customer view becomes a sub-ledger report: pick the control account, see the breakdown by contact, drill into any contact's statement. The sum of all contacts always equals the control account's balance — that identity is the whole point, and it is checkable at any time.
What does not change
- Day-to-day operations: credit sales, receipts, supplier payments all work exactly as before. Cashiers notice nothing.
- Existing statements: a contact's history remains a single continuous statement across the switch.
Before you enable it
- Involve your accountant. The trial balance gets shorter (customer leaves disappear into the control line); anyone reading it should expect that.
- Businesses with existing per-contact heads are migrated by support, folding existing leaves onto the control account so history stays intact. Don't flip the setting on a ledger with years of per-contact history without that migration.
- Enable at a period boundary (start of a month or financial year) so comparisons stay clean.
Frequently asked questions
Can I still see one customer's full statement? Yes — the sub-ledger drill-down shows any contact's complete statement, the same information the old per-customer head held.
Does this affect how much a customer owes? No. Balances are identical; only where they're recorded changes.
We have both walk-in and corporate customers — does everyone move? All contact postings use the control account once enabled. Corporate customers are simply the busiest rows of the sub-ledger.