what is debit ans credit?

ACCOUNTS:   The records that are kept for the individual asset, liability, equity, revenue, expense, and dividend components are known as accounts.  In other words, a business would maintain an account for cash, another account for inventory, and so forth for every other financial statement element.  All accounts, collectively, are said to comprise a firm's general ledger.  In a manual processing system, you could imagine the general ledger as nothing more than a notebook, with a separate page for every account.  Thus, you could thumb through the notebook to see the "ins" and "outs" of every account, as well as existing balances.  An account could be as simple as the following: This account reveals that cash has a balance of $63,000 as of January 12.  By examining the account, you can see the various transactions that caused increases and decreases to the $50,000 beginning of month cash balance.  In many respects, this Cash account resembles the "register" you might keep for a wallet style check book.  If you were to prepare a balance sheet on January 12, you would include cash for the indicated amount (and, so forth for each of the other accounts comprising the entire financial statements). T-ACCOUNTS:  A useful tool for demonstrating certain transactions and events is the "t-account."  Importantly, one would not use t-accounts for actually maintaining the accounts of a business.  Instead, they are just a quick and simple way to figure out how a small number of  transactions and events will impact a company.  T-accounts would quickly become unwieldy in an enlarged business setting.  In essence, t-accounts are just a "scratch pad" for account analysis.  They are useful communication devices to discuss, illustrate, and think about the impact of transactions.  The physical shape of a t-account is a "T," and debits are on the left and credits on the right.  The "balance" is the amount by which debits exceed credits (or vice versa).  At right is the t-account for Cash for the transactions and events of Xao Corporation.  Carefully compare this t-account to the actual running balance ledger account which is also shown (notice that the debits in black total to $33,800, the credits in red total to $7,500, and the excess of debits over credits is $26,300 -- which is the resulting account balance shown in blue).