T-Accounts… Urgh!

Hi,

I am currently working through Prepayments and Accruals and I although I now understand what these are, I really can’t get my head around… T-Accounts. This question is really to do with the nature of t-accounts rather than anything else.

For example, I am working through Chapter 4 – Example 2, Accruals, and we add the three quarterly paid cash amounts to the debits on the Telephone account, then at the end we sum these.

Now the bit I don’t understand:-

We then ‘balance’ the T-account by adding the BALance to the credit column for the same value, and then we add a corresponding BALance back to the debit side, this is where I become lost.

1. Why are we even doing this?
2. This leads to a very ‘messy’ t-account with a huge list of payments, for example, in my t-account we have made three payments (500, 600, 750) totalling 1850.

My t-account now has 500, 600, 750, then the SUM(1850), then BAL 1850 underneath.

If I was really a bookkeeper or looking at these accounts as I would assume the payments were now in fact 3700 for the year. (Not that I know anything about managing accounts until now, of course).

I guess my question is why we do the BAL (balance) thing, or is this just representing what would happen at the end of the year?

I have ignored this problem for a few chapters but just want to clarify what is happening in my own head before I carry on as I really am just following the lectures but not really understanding why we keep balancing the same t-account throughout the lecture and if I should be crossing off something above or similar.