Accounting humor – debits go on the left!
I was browsing the web the other day (I don’t even remember what I was originally looking for) and I came upon an accounting message board. I saw some posts about accounting jokes and thought I would check it out.
I found a long discussion about an old accounting joke that I heard while attending my very first accounting class at Clinton Community College. The members of this forum were trying to figure out how old this joke was and what the original version of it was since there were several variations of it.
Here is the joke as I heard it back in 1991: (I say that as if it was a really long time ago!)
This story is set in the days before computers, when accountants had to do everything manually on paper. A man who worked in the accounting department of a large company was famous for never, ever making a mistake. His ledgers always balanced to the penny and he never had to make any adjusting entries to correct anything. All of his co-workers noticed that he had a peculiar routine to start his day. Every day he would come into work, sit down and open the drawer to his desk. He would look inside for a few seconds, nod his head and then get to work. He was the perfect accountant for over 40 years until the day finally came when he retired from the company. They gave him a gold watch, patted him on the back and walked him out the door. As soon as the door slammed shut behind him the other accountants raced over to his desk to see what was inside. They found a note taped to the bottom of the drawer that read “Remember, debits go on the left”.
It’s amazing what passes for humor in the accounting world, huh? But I did find something interesting in the discussion about this joke. They were discussing a variation on the story. It involves something about people needing to walk past the window to get their debits approved so “debits go by the window, and the window is on the left.”
According to one person, there is some basis to this joke. In the old days the windows in an accounting room (or any writing room) were always on the left so as to not cast a shadow from the writing hand. So remembering “The debits go by the window” put the debits properly on the left. Of course the joke then goes on to say that the accountant changed jobs and all of his entries were backwards because the window was on the other side of the room.
What’s the point of this whole thing, you might be asking yourself? It is simply that “debits go on the left”. It really does help to think about the very basics of accounting when you are doing any type of bookkeeping. If you think in terms of the “T account”, debits go on the left of the T and credits are on the right. Entries on the left will increase assets and expenses and decrease everything else.
Sometimes my colleagues will start talking about how a particular transaction will affect certain accounts, but they talk in broad, general terms which I find confusing. I always bring it back down to the basics of debits and credits. Sure, it’s great to know that if the business owner sells that piece of equipment they will have a big gain to pay taxes on, but that doesn’t help me get his books in order. That particular transaction will require a credit to the fixed asset account, a debit to accumulated depreciation, a debit to the checking account and a credit to the gain on disposal account. And some people love to generalize with round numbers and they often screw up the math and come up with a bottom line that is way off. I always like to take two minutes and jot down the debits and credits on paper with the actual numbers. That way I know what I’m talking about and there won’t be any surprises later on.
I’ve wanted to write about this topic for a few days now, but I couldn’t figure out how to word everything so that it would flow nicely. Now that I’ve finally written it I can see that I still haven’t figured out how to make it flow but I’m not going to re-work it too much. I really just wanted to get the info about this old joke out there and I’ve accomplished that, so I’m happy.
If you have any accounting-related humor, please leave a comment. I would love to learn some more ways to ridicule other accountants!
QuickBooks Training: Using QuickBooks Classes
I spent all day today cleaning up a client’s QuickBooks information because they have 3 locations but didn’t do anything to separate them in QuickBooks. So there was no way to pull up a useful profit & loss report, which is what they needed.
In QuickBooks, you uses “classes” to provide a breakdown of income and expenses by location, department, property, or any other criteria that is meaningful in your particular business. You assign a class to each transaction. This allows you to report on each class separately. The built-in “Profit & Loss By Class” report is great as it shows one column for each class, then the grand total. Class is also available as a filter so you can modify other reports to only show transactions from certain classes.
Here’s a quick video tutorial I just put together to demonstrate how to use classes in QuickBooks. I kind of messed up recording the audio so I had to go back and render the whole video over again, which made a pretty large file for some reason. I didn’t go back to fix it so please be patient if it takes a while to load – I promise I’ll do better next time!
Video Length:7:07
QuickBooks Error 3371
A co-worker ran into a problem while she was working out at a client’s office this week and she called me for help. QuickBooks wouldn’t open and gave her the following message:
Could not initialize license properties. Error 3371: QuickBooks could not load the license data. This may be caused by missing or damaged files.
I had never encountered this problem before so I hit Google and after a couple of minutes came up with several support articles.
I saw messageboard postings from several people that experienced this error message after installing one of the Norton Anti-Virus products. Apparently it overwrites a key QuickBooks file and QuickBooks can’t start up due to the corruption.
The QuickBooks support knowledgebase suggested 3 different steps to resolve the issue. The last resort was to completely uninstall and reinstall QuickBooks, which we wanted to avoid if at all possible. How many clients do you have that would be able to easily locate their installation CD, installation key code and registration number? I decided to have her try the easiest step first, which was to repair the QuickBooks installation. These are the steps involved:
- Close QuickBooks.
- Click the Windows Start button and select Run.
- Enter control in the Open field and click OK.
- Double-click Add or Remove Programs.
- Right-click your QuickBooks program version and click Change/Remove.
- Follow the instructions to Repair your QuickBooks installation, and then open QuickBooks.
This process took about 10 minutes and when it was done she was able to open QuickBooks normally and get to work. Problem solved!
This is just another example of how the Norton Anti-Virus line of products have fallen from grace over the last few years. Norton used to be the product to recommend and was considered the best anti-virus program. Now I go out of my way to recommend that people avoid it whenever possible. It causes so many conflicts with other software and is such a resource hog that I can’t recommend it to anyone. I recommend products such as NOD32, AVG and Trend Micro.
