Reconciling the general ledger can detect certain types of transaction processing errors.
For example, the total of all reductions to accounts payable should equal the total cash disbursements
to vendors. A cash disbursement that is entered in the journal but not posted to
the vendor’s account would be detected by an imbalance in the general ledger. The specific
cause of an out-of-balance condition may not be apparent at this point, but the error would
be noted. Finding the error may require examining all the transactions processed during
the period and could be time consuming. For this reason, rather than summarizing an
entire day’s transactions in a single batch, entities often group transactions into small
batches of 50 to 100 items. This process facilitates reconciling balances by isolating a
problem to a specific batch.