In our lifetime, we all have written a diary either out of our own interest or due to the demand of the syllabus.
I fall into the latter category; I did it due to the syllabus. And hence, I do not recall the exact format of a diary. But, even with my fuzzy memory, I could still draw similarities between a personal diary and a business diary (i.e., journal) which are what I will describe to you this small conversation.
If I recall correctly, we start by affectionately addressing the diary as “My Diary” or “Dear Diary” along with the date, time and / or day and then, we would write the body i.e., the happenings of the day presented in multiple paragraphs. And all this would end with, say, a Goodnight!
Recording events or transactions in Journal, as in the diary of business, has its own special format which has small differences from the one used for a personal diary.
The “My Diary” of a personal journal is substituted with Journal of [Business/Proprietor’s Name] which has a more formal tone to fit the seriousness of a business.
Date, of course, is included but the time and place of events as in a personal diary, is not needed. Another thing to note is that the business journal does not use descriptive paragraphs. Rather, it uses a tabular format where date is the first column.
The Particulars column is similar to the body of a normal diary and describes the business transactions which happened during the day in a very unique manner.
Since a Business Journal follows a formal tone, greetings like Goodnight are ignored. In addition, it has 3 unique columns namely, ‘L.F.’ , ‘Debit (₹)’ and ‘Credit (₹)’.
We’ll talk about L.F. much later in our series. As for Debit and Credit, we must first discuss the two-fold nature of a transaction or, what the accounting world calls the ‘Dual Aspect Concept’.
Reference
Topic 3.4.1 from NCERT Class 11 Accountancy Textbook –
https://ncert.nic.in/textbook/pdf/keac103.pdf
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