Owner's Equity Journal Entry

Welcome to our tutorial on the journal entry for owner's equity, where we'll go through the previous example with our sample business, George's Catering, and see what the debit and credit entries need to be.

Check your understanding of this lesson by taking the quiz in the Test Yourself! section further below. And right at the bottom of the page, you can find more questions on the topic submitted by fellow students.

Owner's Equity Journal Entry Example

a) George decides to start a catering business and invests $15,000 of his personal funds into the bank account of the business.

To work out the double entry we're going to first review how this transaction would affect our basic accounting equation:

Remember, the investment of assets in a business by the owner or owners is called capital.

The owner’s stake in the business (owner’s equity) increases when he invests assets in the business, because it is his assets.

George’s Catering now consists of assets (cash) of $15,000, and the owner owns all $15,000 of these assets.

So, the owner’s equity, and specifically the account called "capital," is credited.

The Dr, as shown above, stands for debere, a Latin word meaning "to owe", and from which we get the term debit.

The Cr above stands for credere, a Latin word meaning "to trust", and from which we get the term credit.

Those are the origins of the words Debit and Credit.

Reminder: the entry of a debit and a credit is what is known in accounting as the double-entry system.

The double-entry system means that, for each transaction, two entries are made by the accountant. These two entries enable us to show that the total assets of the business belong to the people you owe money to (liabilities) and to the owner himself (owner’s equity).

The double-entry system, and accounting as a whole, is all based on the equation above.

Test Yourself!

Before you start, I would recommend to time yourself to make sure that you not only get the questions right but are completing them at the right speed.

Important: The solution sheet on the following page only shows the solutions and not whether you got each of the questions right or wrong. So before you start, get yourself a piece of paper and a pen to write down your answers. Once you're done with the quiz and writing down your answers, click the Check Your Answers button at the bottom and you'll be taken to our page of solutions.

Did that journal entry make sense? If so, move ahead to our next lesson, where we'll tackle the journal entry for a bank loan.

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