[Anonymous]

Was studying some journal entries last night, and the lecturer kept using the phrases “charged to” or “charged against” to describe the debits and credits.

I usually just think of normal balances when doing debits and credits, but the way he used the terms (while I didnt completely understand his phrasing) was still pretty nice.

It spiked my curiosity enough to look up the definition of “charge”, which I found answered here in the first two lines:

https://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/charge.html

So “charge” according to this site is to debit an account. Is that right?

It may sound ridiculous, but – even this late in the game – I dont recall any teacher or text book defining “charge” as a debit to an account. : O

I’d like to be able to understand statements like “charged to” and “charged against”, but that definition seemed really off.

[acamp]

These terms are used all the time in practice and are more easily understood in context.

I would say, “charged to” as an example might suggest a new transaction that will impact the P&L. We gave Salesman Bubba a $10K Bonus which we charged to the S&M Bonus account.

Charged against sounds more like reserve talk, charge against something that already exists. Ripoff Corp went out of business, we wrote off the balance and charged it against the A/R allowance.

Again, these are not perfect definitions and context plays a large role in their use and understanding. People toss business-y words around all the time, so context is often needing to understand the meaning in a particular instance.

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[Author]

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