I think that the major challenge in understanding debits and credits is that different accounts have different 'signs' that may seem counter-intuitive.
For example, if you earn money (get revenue) this is something that you would typically consider 'positive', however revenue is a credit account and so the earning of revenue is actually a credit.
A simple trick is to recognize that balance sheet accounts have signs that align with our intuitive understanding of positive and negative, whereas income statement accounts are flipped. To grok why that is gets a little more tricky and the linked article seems to give a great basis for understanding that.
Source: I'm a Canadian CPA, CA (and CBV) and soon-to-be software engineer. I think this helps understand both perspectives.
> A simple trick is to recognize that balance sheet accounts have signs that align with our intuitive understanding of positive and negative, whereas income statement accounts are flipped. To grok why that is gets a little more tricky
For me, what made this less tricky, was thinking in terms of flows and their accumulation. A debit entry is a flow of value into an account, a credit entry is a flow of value out of an account (a debit or credit balance is simply an accumulation of those flows.)
We also believe that classifying expenses as debit-normal on the income statements, thereby obscuring their contra-income status is part of the puzzle.
For example, if you earn money (get revenue) this is something that you would typically consider 'positive', however revenue is a credit account and so the earning of revenue is actually a credit.
A simple trick is to recognize that balance sheet accounts have signs that align with our intuitive understanding of positive and negative, whereas income statement accounts are flipped. To grok why that is gets a little more tricky and the linked article seems to give a great basis for understanding that.
Source: I'm a Canadian CPA, CA (and CBV) and soon-to-be software engineer. I think this helps understand both perspectives.