Principles of Financial Accounting (Jonick)

Accounting may be defined as the process of analyzing, classifying, recording, summarizing, and interpreting business transactions. One of the key aspects of the process is keeping “running totals” of “things.” Examples of items a business might keep track of include the amount of cash the business currently has, what a company has paid for utilities for the month, the amount of money it owes, its income for the entire year, and the total cost of all the equipment it has purchased. You want to always have these running totals up to date so they are readily available to you when you need the information. It is similar to checking what your cash balance in the bank is when deciding if you have enough money to make a purchase with your debit card.

We will now refer to these “running totals” as balances and these “things” as accounts. Any item that a business is interested in keeping track of in terms of a running dollar balance so it can determine “how much right now?” or “how much so far?” is set up as an account. There are five types, or categories, of accounts.

1.3.1 The Journal

Financial statements are key goals of the accounting process. In order to prepare them at the end of an accounting period, individual financial transactions must be analyzed, classified, and recorded all throughout the period. This initially takes place in a record book called the journal, where financial events called transactions are recorded as they happen, in chronological order.

When a transaction occurs, two or more accounts are affected. There is also a dollar amount associated with each of the accounts. Determining which accounts are impacted, and by how much, is the first step in making a journal entry. This is a sample of a few rows in a journal. It has five columns: Date, Account, Post. Ref., Debit, Credit.

1.3.4 Ledger

The ledger is the second accounting record book that is a list of a company’s individual accounts list in order of account category. While the journal lists all types of transactions chronologically, the ledgers separate this same information out by account and keep a running balance of each of these accounts.

Each account has its own ledger page. The account name appears across the top. The ledger form has six columns: Date, Item, Debit, Credit, Debit, Credit. The first set of Debit and Credit columns are where amounts from the journal transactions are copied. The second set of Debit and Credit columns are where the account’s running total is maintained. An account’s running balance typically appears in either the Debit or the Credit column, not both.

The following is a sample ledger for the Cash account.