Why would a company maintain separate account receivable ledgers?

Well, 1st account receivables are money that customers send a company. If companies only received money from one source like credit cards, they would only have to maintain one account receivable ledger. Multi-Divisional companies like Wal-Mart receive their payments from cash, credit cards, gift cards, food stamps, and whatever, but they have millions of customers everyday. So, they might choose to have separate ones for each state. It basically just a way of organizing each company has different needs, and if you want someone as director to know which employee screw up where, they'll have different account receivable ledger to keep track of who's doing what and whether someone is stealing. Companies can't tell if everything is okay, if it is so cluttered, it's like finding a needle in a hay stack. They have to have everything "bite size", and easy to digest.