In a typical 2-column manual accounting system, transactions are entered as debits to one (or more) account and balancing credits to one (or more) account. If you consider some recurring transactions (such as sales) that will hopefully occur many times during an accounting cycle, all this double entry can add up to a lot of work. That's where special journals come into play.

Special journals are designed as a simple way to record a single type of frequently occurring transaction. The types of special journals depends on the nature of the business, but a few types are frequently seen in businesses that rely on manual accounting procedures:

• Sales Journal
• Cash Receipts Journal
• Purchases Journal
  
• Cash Payments Journal
  

The Cash Receipts Journal is used to record sales of merchandise for cash. (Credit sales are not recorded here, they belong in the sales journal.)

All transactions in the cash receipts journal involve the receipt of cash, so you'll find a column for debiting cash (Cash DR.). There is also a debit column for sales discounts in case the transaction involves a sale that is discounted.

To balance these debits, you'll find three credit columns. Sales and Accounts Receivable are the two accounts that will mostly be involved in these transactions (besides cash, of course). The column for Other Accounts is for all other types of cash-receiving transactions that don't involve sales or accounts receivable.

See the columns available in the Cash Receipts Journal in Figure A below. (To see Figure A, click the A button in the flash program at the bottom of this page. This is where you'll find all the figures for this tutorial.)

Consider the following four examples for your cash receipts journal:

• Customer A sends a check for a prior sale, paying $10,357.55 and taking a $102.55 sales discount;
• You make a cash sale for $452;
• Customer B sends a check for a prior sale, paying $6,120;
• You are paid $3,000 in principal and $155 in interest on a note.

The column values are posted in their own separate ways: 

• Transactions from the Other Accounts column should be posted individually in the general ledger, as shown in Figure B below. (The account number for the general ledger account is placed in the posting column of the Cash Receipts Journal.)
  
• Cash Sales recorded in the Cash Receipts Journal should be posted as a single Sales credit total in your general ledger, as shown in Figure C below.
• Like cash sales, sales discounts should be posted as a single Sales Discounts credit total in your general ledger, as shown in Figure C below.
• Cash should be posted as a single debit total in your general ledger, as shown in Figure D below.
• When you record cash payments towards accounts receivables, you should post individual transactions as credits to the customer accounts in the accounts receivable ledger, as shown in Figure E below.