Journal Questions

There have been a number of "journal" questions emailed in recently. There is a double entry bookkeeping article link on one of the posts to explain the basics.

If you have a specific journal question, please email it and we will answer.

The main thing to remember when doing journal entries is that you will need to post two sides to the journal, a debit and a credit. There are always two sides to every journal.

The debit comes first, what account do you need to debit, for example are you increasing an expense? If so, you debit the expense code and credit another item such as a bank account?

For example, you have been charged a bank fee for the month. You would debit the "bank fee" account in your expenses and you would credit the bank account in the balance sheet.

If you are recording a journal for interest you may have received during the month, it would be a debit to the bank account in the balance sheet and a credit to the income received interest account in the profit and loss.

Sometimes a journal will effect only balance sheet accounts, sometimes it will effect only profit and loss accounts. More often however the journals will effect both the profit and loss accounts and the balance sheet accounts.

Remember any questions can be emailed for free to our email service!