28 July 2011
Debit and Credit are formal bookkeeping and accounting terms that have opposite meanings and come from Latin. Debit comes from debere, which means "to owe". The Latin debitum means "debt". Credit comes from the Latin word credere, which means "to believe".
Debit is abbreviated Dr., while credit is abbreviated Cr.
"Debit" also refers to the left side of a general ledger account, while "Credit" refers to the right side.
A debit is also (informally) referred to as a "charge."
A debit or credit changes the balance of an account. Asset and expense accounts increase in value when debited and decrease when credited, whereas liability, equity, and revenue accounts decrease in value when debited and increase when credited. This distinction is somewhat counterintuitive, until the nature of those accounts is more closely scrutinized. For example, revenue is coded as a credit. After recording a day's sales, the company will have credited a certain amount in revenue, and since credits are negative numbers, the balance grows more and more negative. An adjustment to revenue would need to be a debit, because its purpose is to bring the revenue totals closer to zero.
It is often assumed that a debit decreases a balance, and a credit increases it, because this is how the terms are used on bank statements and using a debit card decreases the balance in one's bank account. However, this is because bank statements are traditionally written from the bank's perspective, where the customer's account is a liability. By withdrawing money, the customer is decreasing the bank's liability. Since liability accounts normally have a credit balance, the withdrawal of cash from a banking account is reflected on the bank's balance sheet as a debit.
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