The activity of any accountant, no matter which company or organization he works in, is necessarily associated with accounts. All operations in accounting are made out with their help. To simply explain to a person who an accountant is, they often say that this is an accountant. Now, let's look at this word carefully: the accountant is the one who manages the accounts. It follows that the essence of the work of an accountant is to service this or that account. There are as many accounts in accounting as there are activities in the economy. Classification of accounting accounts helps not to get lost in this vast array.
What is her help? The accounts are divided into groups to create a system that makes it easier for an accountant to work. However, this work is quite capacious, complex and ambiguous. So, if we consider accounting as a science, we have to classify accounts using scientific methods. If you have ever studied accounting, you probably know that there are balance sheet, inventory, financial, budgetary, business, property, production, synthetic, analytical and other groups of accounts. However, this classification of accounting accounts is rarely used in life.
A practicing accountant usually prefers to use a list of accounts developed by the government in their activities. Classification of accounting accounts by this type it divides the accounts depending on the field of activity that they serve. As an example, you can bring familiar phrases to everyone, which are also the names of accounts: “Cashier”, “Profit”, “Financial Result”.
And yet, the most famous system of accounts (classic accounting) divides them into three groups. Each group combines accounts that are filled in according to the unified rules for deriving the total amount. If the debit total is active accounts, if the credit is passive, if floating is active-passive. Such a division is associated with the balance sheet - the main document that every accountant must reduce annually. Asset and Liabilities - two columns of this document (hence the names of accounts). The asset accounts for the property, and the Passive - the sources of this property. It is not difficult to work with active accounts, but passive accounting accounts sometimes cause some difficulties. To avoid them, it is important to remember that all operations with a passive account are recorded in a mirror image compared to the active one. So, if the increase in the active account is displayed in debit, then in the passive account in credit. Therefore, the balance (total amount) for the passive account should always be on the right side of the account (credit).
It is even easier to get confused by filling out active-passive accounting accounts. These are particularly dynamic accounts, since their balance can be not only in liabilities or in assets. It can periodically change or be in a liability and an asset at the same time.
The classification of accounting accounts by balance type is described in detail using an example. Suppose you decide to buy a new refrigerator. How to write it on the accounts? (Let’s take the names of accounts from life.) Your cash that you pay to the seller is an expense on the active Wallet account and at the same time arrival on the passive account Home Appliances. You spent the money, you have less, but your property has increased. However, if you took out a loan to buy a refrigerator, then your active-passive Credit Card account will have debt in the amount that you paid in the store. And if you lent money to a neighbor last month to buy a phone and he has not returned it to you, then at the moment your active-passive Credit Card account has balances both in debit (you owe to the bank) and in credit ( you owe a neighbor). If after buying a refrigerator you were able to live until the end of the month on the remaining salary and at the same time postponed it, then at the end of the month your active-passive Savings account will have a credit balance (profit), and if you did not have enough money, you had to get the deferred funds and spend them on food, then the same Savings account at the end of the month will have a debit balance (loss). This situation may change next month.