Examples to Help You
Learn Debit and Credit

Here are some examples of debit credit transactions to help you learn debit and credit and better understand how it works.

For a summary of debit credit, click here.

The simplest debit credit transaction is writing a check because both your expense accounts and your asset accounts are debited to increase and credited to decrease.

So to write a check, you would debit (increase) your expense account and credit (decrease) your asset / bank account.

To provide an example of how a check would look as a debit / credit entry, let's say you are recording a check you wrote to your landlord for $2000 to pay the rent.

The check was written from your checking account (asset account), thereby decreasing this account and was posted to your rent account (expense account) and has increased your rent expenses.

This is how this check would look as a general journal entry.

Now that you understand that, let's try a harder example. If you haven't already done so, you might want to review our summary of credit vs debit before we continue.

OK, now lets say that you have you purchased a new computer system for your office that cost $8000 with your credit card. In this case you have increased your equipment asset account, but you have also increased your credit card liability account.

Since your equipment is an asset account, debiting it will increase it. But your credit card is a liability account so crediting it will increase it. Therefore your journal entry will look like this.

When you pay off your credit card, you will decrease your credit card liability account and decrease your bank asset account as well, like this.

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