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Comment by hiq | Hacker News Reader

I'm not that familiar with the theory, in my case I just got started and now I'm used to it. Just to take the last example:

    2021-03-20 Sprouts
        expenses:food:groceries  $100
        assets:cash               $40
        assets:checking

This means you took 140 from your checking account, withdrew 40 that you now have in cash, and spent 100 in groceries. Does that still make no sense?

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Honestly no. When I first read it I thought you'd spent 140 on sprouts which I thought was excessive, but each to their own.

Even though you've explained it I'm still struggling to make sense of it. The 3 indented lines don't related at all in an intuitive manner at least for me.

Understandable, they are using transaction balancing / elision

What they should be showing beginners is:

    2021-03-20 Sprouts
        expenses:food:groceries  $100
        assets:cash               $40
        assets:checking         $-140

How’s that?

I don't think the file format above is especially conductive to learning. In my experience, most people learn double-entry bookkeeping with T accounts; debit is on the left, credit is on the right, and total credit has to equal total debit.

If you're interested, this seems like a fairly decent guide: https://www.open.edu/openlearn/money-business/introduction-b...

A possible source of confusion is that in this context, "Sprouts" is likely the name of a supermarket (not a type of food).

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