What are control accounts and why do they ask for an authority code?

A control account is a summary level account in your nominal ledger, this account will contain aggregated totals for transactions that fall into that category.

For example, sales ledger control will include the total balance of all your sales ledger accounts. The nominal for this is 0.0.60.1.

Control accounts within Navigator usually have the prefix 0.0.*.*, however, there are exceptions.

For example new vehicle stock will be 1.30.60.80. Where this nominal code denotes the branch and department (detailed below)

Guide on how nominal codes are structured 

One important thing to factor in with control accounts, is that manual nominal journals won't effect the ledger itself, only the nominal.

This means that imbalances can be created by journaling into control accounts.

The below articles cover this in more detail.

Reversing a journal - when should it be avoided?

The reason Navigator requires authority codes for most control accounts is to limit the risk of generating these imbalances by accidentally posting into a control account.

These can be found in "Setup" > "General Setup"