Record Keeping In Business

PUBLISHING CORPORATION NEW YORK CHICAGO COPYRIGHT, 1940 BY PITMAN PUBUSHING C All rights resented. No part of tJQs book may be reproduced in any form without the itritten permission of the publisher. AFFILIATED COMPANIES- W London Bath Toronto Melbourne Johannesburg Singapore PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA PREFACE The clerical field absorbs approximately 18 of all employed workers. The majority of these clerical workers might be listed as file clerks, billing clerks, posting clerks, entry clerks, computing machine operators, duplicating machine operators, transcribing clerks, typists, switchboard operators, and general clerks who operate various office appliances or perform routine or repetitive duties in offices. Some of the duties of these clerks are often performed by the same person. Occasionally these duties are learned on the job through the apprentice system. Often the ability to perform with versatility secures a position against competition. The opportunity for the youthful entrant into business depends largely on his pre-job or in-school training. j i ml An examination of the duties performed Dy Rand or by machine in dicates a large field in record-keeping which emphasizes one or more phases of bookkeeping without necessarily encompassing the bookkeeping cycle as we know it in the technical study of accounting. The emphasis falls on specific record, prepared in a definite way and maintained con sistently by routine instructions or prescription to the person assigned to that duty. While the performance does, in a-measure, call for anal ysis, interpretation, and judgment characteristic of bookkeeping practice, it stresses in the main accuracy, system, and order. Theauthors, who have been connected with continuation schools and vocational schools for many years, have experienced the need for a text in record-keeping that stresses the vocational aspects of the course. The text has been prepared, therefore, to provide for the development of recording skills through objective activities. The student is exposed to the same type of experiences in learning to keep books as he would be if he were employed as an apprentice assisting a bookkeeper. This work is performed as a part of the routine followed in a retail store, a setting that has been selected because retailing itself represents such a large field of commercial enterprise, and because the recording procedures in this field are common to most types of business. In the trading field, business activities are organized around buying, selling, and handling cash. Paralleling this organization, the subject matter has been divided into units or cycles that represent the recorda tive phases of buying, selling, and handling cash. Each unit embraces journalizing, posting, and preparing a trial balance, thereby giving the student a unified impression of record-keeping. In the field of adult education, in which a large percentage of students do not complete the semester, there is a definite need for small units that can be taught in shorter periods. The repetition of the cycle of recording should tend to build up the students skill to a vocational level, which is the chief objective. Instead of first studying generalizations and abstract concepts that are meaningless if learned by rote, the student acquires a background of recording experiences that are closely related to business activities. The necessarybusiness forms are introduced in their proper sequence sp that their relationship to bookkeeping records is shown, and the need for making each entry is disclosed to the student so that he knows the reason for setting up a definite system of record-keeping. After he has repeated the routine of verifying, journalizing, posting, and preparing the trial balance in the first two units, the student is prepared to formulate rules for recording changes in assets, liabilities, capital, income, and expense...