Sundry, miscellaneous and general: what catch-all accounts hide

By Peter Edwards ACMA CGMA · Chartered Management Accountant in practice

Every chart of accounts has them: Sundry expenses. Miscellaneous. General costs. They exist for the genuinely unclassifiable — and in a well-kept ledger they're tiny, because almost nothing genuinely is. When a catch-all account grows into one of the larger overhead lines, it has changed function: it's where coding decisions go to be avoided. Like suspense, it's a symptom account — but worse in one respect, because a suspense balance at least looks wrong, while "sundry expenses £18,400" looks like an answer.

Why catch-alls grow

• Speed over decisions. Bank-feed coding at pace, and "sundry" is always an available answer that never bounces back with a question.
• A chart of accounts that doesn't fit the business. If there's no natural home for a recurring cost — software subscriptions in a chart written for a builder — the catch-all becomes its home by default.
• Inherited habits. The previous bookkeeper coded a supplier to sundry once; the bank rule remembered it forever.

What's actually in there

Empty one and the same finds recur. Recurring subscriptions that deserve their own line (and that nobody realises the business is still paying). Costs with tax treatments that needed individual attention — entertaining filed beside travel, personal spend beside genuine business costs — all now carrying whatever treatment the catch-all's default applied. Occasionally, the interesting ones: payments to individuals, round-sum transfers, things that were coded to sundry precisely because someone didn't want to think about what they were. A large catch-all doesn't just blur the P&L — it launders individual decisions into an aggregate nobody reviews.

The measure, and the fix

Measure it as a share of overheads: catch-alls at a percent or two of total overheads are normal life; at ten percent-plus, the overhead analysis is fiction and any benchmarking, budgeting or tax review built on it inherits the fiction. The fix is mechanical and satisfying:

1. Export the account's transaction listing and sort by payee. Catch-alls are usually a few recurring suppliers plus a tail — the recurring ones recode in bulk.
2. Create the missing homes: the recurring costs that had nowhere to go get their own accounts. This is chart-of-accounts repair, not just recoding.
3. Fix the bank rules that were feeding the catch-all, or the balance regrows next month.
4. Review the tail individually — it's small by definition, and it's where the items that needed individual attention are hiding.
5. Set the standard: the catch-all is allowed to exist and required to stay trivial. Anything recurring in it for two consecutive months earns its own code.

In a pre-engagement review, price the catch-all like suspense: pull the listing, count the items, quote per item with the bulk-recode discount visible — and treat its size as a proxy for the coding discipline you're inheriting everywhere else.

Related: The suspense account that won't clear · Manual journal reliance: when the ledger is being forced