Account
An account is a single named bucket in a chart of accounts, belonging to exactly one of five types, that journal entries post debits and credits to.
In short
A named line in the chart of accounts — Checking, Materials, Sales — that a journal entry can debit or credit. Every account belongs to exactly one of five types, and that type decides which side of an entry grows it and which shrinks it.
Also called: ledger account, chart-of-accounts line
An account is the fundamental unit a chart of accounts is made of — a single named bucket, like Checking or Materials or Sales, that a journal entry can post a debit or a credit to. Every account belongs to exactly one of five types: asset, liability, equity, income, or expense, and that type fixes its normal balance — the side it's expected to sit on when healthy.
An account's balance is simply the running total of every debit and credit ever posted to it. Checking, an asset, rises with debits (money arriving) and falls with credits (money leaving). Materials, an expense, works the same way. A liability like Credit Card runs the opposite direction: it rises with credits (new charges) and falls with debits (payments).
In BalanceMCP, an account carries a code, a name, a type, and an archived flag rather than a delete option — since the journal that posted against it is append-only, an account with any history has to keep existing so that history has somewhere to point. A brand-new account with no history yet can simply sit unused; there's no requirement that every account in the chart ever gets posted to.
Bank accounts and credit cards each get their own dedicated account rather than sharing a generic bucket, specifically so a transfer between two of your own connected accounts stays visible as a real movement of money instead of netting to nothing. That one-account-per-connection design is what makes a chart of accounts more than just a category list — it's the actual structure your money is tracked moving through.
What people get wrong
- Assuming an archived account is deleted — it's closed to new postings, but every past entry against it, and its history, stay fully intact.
- Creating a new account for a one-off distinction that will never be looked at again, rather than using the memo field on the entry.
- Forgetting that an account's type — not its code — is what actually determines whether a debit or a credit grows it.
Common questions
- What determines whether an account grows with a debit or a credit?
- Its type. Assets and expenses grow with debits; liabilities, equity, and income grow with credits. There are only five types, and every account belongs to exactly one.
- Can an account be deleted once it's been used?
- No — it can be archived, which stops new postings while keeping every past entry and its history intact. There's no true delete for an account with history behind it.
Machine-readable: /api/knowledge/concept:account