Читать книгу QuickBooks 2022 All-in-One For Dummies - Nelson Stephen L., Stephen L. Nelson - Страница 50

You may already be able to guess that if you know an account’s starting balance and have a way to add up the debits and the credits to the account, you can easily calculate the ending account balance.

Take the case of the cash account balance of the hot dog stand. If you look at the balance sheet shown in Table 2-2, you see that the beginning balance for cash is $1,000. You can easily construct a little schedule of how the account balance changes — this schedule is called a T-account — that calculates the ending balance. (In case you’re wondering, a T-account is a visual aid to help in accounting. You start by drawing a big capital T, with debits on the left side and credits on the right side.) In fact, Table 2-15 does just this. If you look closely at Table 2-15, you see that the cash beginning balance is $1,000. Then, on the following lines of the T-account, you see the effects of journal entries 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, and 10. Some of these journal entries credit cash. Some of them debit cash. You can calculate the ending cash balance by combining the debit and credit amounts.

TABLE 2-15 A T-Account of the Cash Account

	Debit	Credit
Beginning balance	$1,000
Journal Entry 4		$1,000
Journal Entry 5		4,000
Journal Entry 6		1,000
Journal Entry 7	13,000
Journal Entry 9		2,000
Journal Entry 10	_____	$1,000
Ending balance	$5,000

The information shown in Table 2-15 should make sense to you. But in case you’re still trying to memorize what debits and credits mean, I’m going to give you a bit more detail. To calculate the ending balance shown in Table 2-15, you add up the debits, add up the credits, and combine the two sums. The net amount in the cash account equals the $5,000 debit. If you recall from the preceding paragraphs, a debit balance in an asset account, such as cash, represents a positive amount. A $5,000 debit balance in the cash account, therefore, indicates that you have $5,000 of cash in the account.

Cash is usually the trickiest account to analyze with a T-account because so many journal entries affect cash. In many cases, however, a T-account analysis of an account balance is much more straightforward. If you look at Table 2-16, you see a T-account analysis of the inventory account. This T-account analysis shows that the beginning inventory account balance equals $3,000. But when Journal Entry 8 credits inventory for $3,000 — this is the journal entry that records the cost of goods sold — the inventory balance is wiped out.

TABLE 2-16 A T-Account of the Inventory Account

	Debit	Credit
Beginning balance	$3,000
Journal Entry 8	_____	$3,000
Ending balance	$0

Paying off the accounts payable and loan payable accounts is similarly straightforward. Table 2-17 shows the T-account analysis of the accounts payable account. Table 2-18 shows the T-account analysis of the loan payable account. In both cases, the T-account analysis shows that the liability accounts start with a credit beginning balance. (Remember that a liability account would have a credit balance if the firm really owed money.) Then, when the payments are recorded to pay off the accounts payable and loan payable in journal entries 9 and 10, the liability account is debited. The result, in the case of both accounts, is that the liability account balance is reduced to zero.

TABLE 2-17 A T-Account of Accounts Payable

	Debit	Credit
Beginning balance		$2,000
Journal Entry 9	$2,000
Ending balance	$0

TABLE 2-18 A T-Account of the Loan Payable Account

	Debit	Credit
Beginning balance		$1,000
Journal Entry 10	$1,000
Ending balance	$0

I’m not going to show T-account analyses of the other accounts that the preceding journal entries use. In every other case, the only debit or credit to the account comes from the journal entry, which means that the journal entry amount is the account balance. Only one journal entry affects the sales revenue account: Journal Entry 7, which credits sales revenue for $13,000. Because the sales revenue account has no beginning balance, that $13,000 credit equals the sales revenue account balance. The expense accounts work the same way.