Book of Prime Entry

A book of prime entry is the place where a financial document is first recorded in the business, for this reason they are called the books of prime entry. The books of prime entry include the:

• Sales day book (day book),
• Cash book
• Petty cash book.

The day books used for credit sales, sales returns and discounts allowed are:

• Sales day book
• Sales returns day book
• Discounts allowed day book

Note

The books of prime entry are not part of the double entry bookkeeping system. The totals from these are however used later in the system.

Reasons for using Books of Prime Entry

• Totals can be checked before they are entered into the ledger accounts
• It reduced the number of individual transactions om the ledger accounts (for example sales would typically be hundreds a day)
• Allows the roles of the accounting department to be split up (one person can enter the individual transactions whilst another can concentrate on the double entry accounts.