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by pessimizer
805 days ago
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> If you overpay a bill, the (positive) difference between what you paid and what you owed is a credit on your account Or it's a debit on the company's account. I think that's the point that was being made; not to confuse technical terms with English common usage, and not to go to the dictionary or etymology(!) as the arbiter. Debits are credits and credits are debits, but the real question is which column does it go into. Same nature as discussions about clients/servers. |
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That's exactly right. They owe you money, so it is (or at least it should be) a credit on your account, and a debit on theirs. But that is not what the definition given in the article says. TFA's definition of "credit" was "An entry that represents money leaving an account" and likewise a debit is "An entry that represents money entering an account." So when you paid your bill, that was (by the articles definition) a credit to your checking account and a debit to your account with company whose bill you were paying, which is exactly backwards. According to the standard English definitions, a credit is something that makes your net worth go up, and a debit is something that makes your net worth go down. So when you pay your bill, that should be a debit to you (cash going out decreases your net worth) and a credit to the counterparty (cash coming in increases their net worth).
> Same nature as discussions about clients/servers.
How so? It seems to me that distinction is clear: the client is the machine that initiated the connection, the one that did the DNS lookup.