Reading the Colours on Journal Entries

Every journal entry amount in URBI is now coloured to tell you whether that account went up or down, not by a fixed rule about which column the amount sits in. This article explains the idea in plain language, with a worked example, so the colours make sense even if you have never studied accounting.

The idea, in plain words

Every journal entry has two sides. Money moving in one entry always has to balance: one or more accounts go up, and one or more accounts go down (or the same account can be split across a few lines), and the two sides always add up to the same total. In URBI's Journal Lines table, one side is the Debit column and the other is the Credit column.

Here is the part that used to be confusing: whether landing in the Debit column or the Credit column makes an account go up or down depends on what kind of account it is.

• For an Asset account (like cash) or an Expense account, a debit makes the balance go up, and a credit makes it go down.
• For a Liability, Equity, or Revenue account, it is the other way around: a credit makes the balance go up, and a debit makes it go down.

You do not need to memorize this. URBI now shows the result directly with colour: green means that account's own balance went up, red means it went down, no matter which column the amount is sitting in.

A worked example with cash

Say your property's Operating Cash account (an Asset account) is debited $2,000.00 because a payment came in. Cash going up is good news, so it shows green, with a plus sign, in the Debit column.

Now say that same Operating Cash account is credited $500.00 because a bill was paid. Cash going down shows red, with a minus sign, in the Credit column, even though it is the same account as before.

The same logic runs the other way for an account like Accounts Payable (a Liability account, meaning what the property owes to a vendor). A credit to Accounts Payable means the property now owes more, so that balance went up, and it shows green even though it is a credit. When that bill is later paid off, a debit to Accounts Payable brings what is owed back down, and that shows red even though it is a debit.

Colour is never the only way to read the direction. Every green or red amount also carries a small triangle (pointing up for an increase, down for a decrease) and a plus or minus sign, and in the journal entry detail drawer, a pill reading Increase or Decrease. You can read the direction from the triangle, the sign, or the word even if you cannot tell red from green.

When an amount shows in plain, uncoloured text

If URBI does not know what kind of account a line belongs to, the amount shows in a plain, neutral colour with the word Unknown in front of it instead of a plus or minus sign, and (in the journal entry detail drawer) an Unknown type pill instead of Increase or Decrease. This only happens when the account's type was not recorded. URBI never guesses a colour when it cannot confirm the direction, because a wrong guess would be worse than no colour at all.

Where this applies

This colour rule appears everywhere a posted journal entry's lines are shown: the general ledger's expanded row, the journal entry detail drawer's Journal Lines table, and the journal entry information shown on an invoice or expense. The same entry always shows the same colours no matter which of these screens you are viewing it from.

One place keeps its own rule: while a journal entry is still being drafted and lines are being entered, the amounts in that editor stay plain debit-and-credit colouring. An account may not even be chosen yet at that point, so there is nothing yet to compare it against.

The separate rule for the transaction list

The general ledger's main transaction list shows one amount per row, for the whole entry, not per account line. That row is coloured by a different, simpler question: what happened to cash in this entry?

• If the entry increased a cash account, the row shows green.
• If the entry decreased a cash account, the row shows red.
• If the entry does not touch a cash account at all, or the cash movement in that entry nets out to zero, the row shows in plain, uncoloured text.

This is a separate rule from the per-account colouring described above, because a single row in the list has to summarize an entire entry, not just one line of it. When you open that row (or the full journal entry detail), each individual line is coloured by the per-account rule instead.