Cash is an asset so debiting it would increase your cash balance. Likewise, Materials is an expense code in the P&L and debiting it will show it as a cost. You would only credit to the P&L for income transactions.
The focus of the post is on the underlying concepts rather than the implementation details — I didn't want to introduce the whole thing about debiting assets vs debiting expenses etc because it's a little confusing for a lay person.
Hope that makes sense. I've added a caption to the image explaining this.
Lying to beginners to shield them from confusion does not help them. Find a way to do what you want to do while still telling the truth.
Why not just rewrite instead of adding a caption that doesn't make sense anyway.
the article says a debit is a loss and a credit is a gain. if you pay for cotton, you've "debited" your cash amount... your cash balance would decrease.
but now you say cash is an asset. ok. so? why does saying that now mean that "debiting" cash increases the cash balance? you certainly don't have more cash on hand... you have less.
Every accounting entry has one side posted to the P&L and the other to the Balance Sheet (unless you're reclassifying between accounts but that's for another time). In the P&L a debit entry indicates a cost to you, and a credit indicates income earned. In the balance sheet, a debit will increase an asset or decrease a liability, vice versa for a credit.
To record a purchase in your books you have to post one side to the P&L and the other to the balance sheet. Because of the rules mentioned above you debit an expense, and because you need to balance out the entry, you post the credit to cash, which conveniently decreases your cash account asset.
It's confusing at first but easier when you understand and accept the mnemonic DEADCLIC.
Many ERP systems do use the convention that debits are positive numbers and credits negative and so only have a single column for amount. This is possibly more confusing for non accountants as they have to understand that a negative income balance means they made money.