Cash Sales
These occur when a customer buys items or services and pays immediately, at the
point of sale. These occur frequently as seen in high street stores, where
individuals go into stores to buy items and pay immediately by cash, cheque, debit
or credit card at the till and are issued a receipt printed by a till or a handwritten
receipt.
When a cash sale takes place, there is no need to raise individual customer’s sales
ledger accounts for each transaction, as the sale is concluded and there is no
outstanding debt to monitor, so the identity of the customer is immaterial in this
case.
A Cash Book will be maintained to record all the cash sales. The Cash Book will be
debited (as the receiving account) and the Sales Account will be credited in the
Ledger.
Credit Sales
These occur when a customer buys items or services with a promise to pay in the
near future which will usually be within a certain number of days as agreed by both
parties. There is an element of risk associated to credit sales. The risk of the
customer paying as may have been agreed by both parties and the risk of the
business being able to sustain its cash flow needs where there are several
customers taking up credit sales. The business will have to establish whether or
not the customer will be able to pay its debt within the agreed period before
allowing any credit sale to such customer and so it may carry out some credit
check processes or seek trade references, especially for new customers.
The procedure for credit sales usually involves more work than cash sales. It may
start with the customer placing an order and the business will need to follow any
set process to check the credit worthiness of the customer, the credit limit issued to
the customer, the settlement due days offered to the customer and how frequently
the customer has been paying its invoices in the past, if it is an old customer.
Once a credit sale has been made, it is necessary to keep a full record of each
transaction, so the complete process of documenting financial transactions
needs to be maintained.
A Sales invoice giving full details of the transaction needs to be prepared and sent
to the customer, while a copy is left in the office. This is then used to complete the
Sales Day Book (a Book of Prime Entry) and the individual customers Sales
Ledger and this feeds into the Trial Balance.