This might clarify the account types (assets, liabilities, equity, income, and expense) as structuring the income/balance reports, and accrual basis accounting as the reason to have "accounts payable/receivable."
Consider also thinking of your accounts as nodes in a directed graph. When you credit account 1 and debit account 2, you draw an edge from 1 to 2, representing a transaction. The credit is the "source" and the debit the "target."
(Double entry means you record a transaction as two updates with opposite charge, so credits and debits are listed separately. This is basically an error-correcting heuristic from 15th century Italy, which is still a good practice.)
So when you send an invoice to a client, that's a transaction. You obtain an asset taken from another entity. So you credit a revenue account and debit an asset account called "accounts receivable" (it's not "cash"). When you receive the payment, you credit accounts receivable and debit cash.
https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/core-fi...
This might clarify the account types (assets, liabilities, equity, income, and expense) as structuring the income/balance reports, and accrual basis accounting as the reason to have "accounts payable/receivable."
Consider also thinking of your accounts as nodes in a directed graph. When you credit account 1 and debit account 2, you draw an edge from 1 to 2, representing a transaction. The credit is the "source" and the debit the "target."
(Double entry means you record a transaction as two updates with opposite charge, so credits and debits are listed separately. This is basically an error-correcting heuristic from 15th century Italy, which is still a good practice.)
So when you send an invoice to a client, that's a transaction. You obtain an asset taken from another entity. So you credit a revenue account and debit an asset account called "accounts receivable" (it's not "cash"). When you receive the payment, you credit accounts receivable and debit cash.