About Control Accounts

A control account is a general ledger account with a balance that reflects the total balances of related subsidiary ledger accounts.

For example, many companies specify control accounts for these areas:

Accounts Payable
Accounts Receivable
Inventory
WIP
Vouchers Payable
Taxes
Bank Accounts
Service Order Labor, Miscellaneous and Deposit Accounts
Service Contract Accounts

Control accounts are defined on the Chart of Accounts form and are generally only used on setup and parameter forms.

Control accounts require some basic security. Users should not be able to manually post transaction amounts to a control account, which might cause the control account to become out of balance. If you select Secure Control Accounts on the General Parameters form, control account numbers are not available on drop-down lists on transaction forms like Purchase Orders or Job Material Transactions, and the account numbers also cannot be manually entered on transaction forms.

However, a user who is assigned the group authorization Allow JE to Ctrl Acct (Allow Journal Entries to Control Accounts) can specify a control account for a manual journal entry in the General journal or a user-defined journal in the Journal Entries, Import Journal Entries, or Journal Builder forms. This allows the correction of Distribution journal entries that were incorrectly assigned to control accounts.