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Comment by mrkeen

2 years ago

> Bob's account has a credit of $12 and a debit of $7

(I'm 80% sure that the above reads that Bob actually owns $5 he can spend. But I'm equally sure that I get Debits and Credits backward, so I probably read it wrong.)

In any case, you've only described a single account at rest. You need to go one step further and describe an entire transaction in those terms, so that someone can swoop in and say "you got it backwards".

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mrkeen

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thomastjeffery  2 years ago

You read it correctly. The account's "balance" would be a "credit of $5".

A transaction involves multiple accounts, so it would be written as multiple sentences: "Alice's account has a credit of $7. Bob's account has a debit of $7." If you want to write about the transaction itself, you could do that with a verb: "Transaction #23254 applies a debit of $7 to Bob's account, and a credit of $7 to Alice's account." A double-entry book is just a table with a column for each account, and a column for the date/time each credit or debit was transacted.

The whole point here is that when someone swoops in, every sentence spoken is guaranteed to be unambiguous; no matter what context that someone brings with them. So long as "credit" and "debit" are used exclusively as nouns, there can be no confusion.