Cross-footing is an accounting term that refers to the totaling of figures contained in rows and columns to double-check that everything is correct.
In accounting jargon, footing refers to the sum of columns. To cross-foot is to sum up the column sums.
Accounting spreadsheets are commonly used to track sales and inventory of a business.
One might be used to list products with one product taking up each row, and columns made up of each month to track the total sales of each product for each month during the year.
Cross footing is the methods of adding an additional row and/or column to sum up all the total numbers to see if the final figures tally. If they do, then the numbers are probably correct.
For example, if all the units of a product sold in each month is totaled up as 600 sold in the year, the grand total sales should be $6,000.
Cross-footing is an easy way to quickly identify any glaring mistakes has been made during accounting.
It can also theoretically be deduced that if a trading business has front-loaded 1,000 units of the product at the start of the year and did not add more inventory during the year, the balance number of units should be 400 since 600 out of the 1,000 has been sold. This is assuming that shrinkage has not occurred.
