[alexambarch]

From what I got out of the article and my own limited understanding of double entry bookkeeping, the "double" seems to be referring to the part where we split a transaction into credits and debits as opposed to a transaction with positive or negative balance. The doubling is happening with the labels we use to describe what's happening with the money.

From an individual account perspective, there's a doubling of the number of columns you could enter a transaction's amount into.

[gorjusborg]

The core innovation of 'double entry' is that you can see the flow of money between accounts for every transaction.

This is possible because you (the accountant) are always adding a back-reference from the other account (hence the 'double' in 'double entry').

There's really not much to it. It throws people that are new to it for a loop, I think, because it is a strange way of behaving, and it isn't obvious why you're doing it until you have to track down something that doesn't balance. It's just a disciplined behavior that accountants started using because it allows one to track things that were difficult without it.

[vpribish]

this is probably not true, but I heard that this stuff predates the idea of negative numbers so you have db and cr accounts that offset each other without negatives.