My Accounting Lecturer, Stop Confusing Me!

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You are learned in debits and credits

Increases and decreases, figures and values,

Balance brought forward and balance carried down

You have the knowledge of digits

You have mastered the T account

You have subdued the intricacies of profits and losses

I don’t begrudge that.

But I ask, is that the knowledge you carry around

Fiddling with figures most confusing

Touting concepts barely understandable?

Where is discovery for a patterned process?

It has always been the same:

Debit for increases

Credit for decreases

Double entry

Bad debts

Provision for bad debts

Income Statement

Balance Sheet

Trading Profit and Loss Account

Image from google: philtered.com

I itched to ask you in class

Why we couldn’t debit a decrease

Or questioned the wisdom in these rules

But of course you would have discounted me

Saying twas against GAAP or such big notions

As if GAAP was the keeper of logic

But again, I don’t blame you

You are a family man

Who has got to feed some mouths

And in any case, “that is the way it is”

So, I sit for hours, half-following added figures

Subtracted values, depreciated assets, missing debts

Unbalanced figures

All this while, my mind is cooking up

Dialogue between quarrelling figures

I think, that could be a nice poem

Figures on a verbal match

At least I could follow this

Because in my mind’s eye, I can see

Figure zero roll up in anger

Stirring up dust

Hardly the same story

For convoluted concepts of accounts

Where my accounts lecturer tells me

It is so because somebody thought so

They could be wrong!

Sir, I demand a special class

Where I will ask about double lines for balanced figures

Or question bank reconciliation and why mediators aren’t called

Or who came up with debits and credits?

(Speaking of which, could be some rhyme in bits and dits

So, could they have been poets after all?)

But no, they couldn’t be poets

Which imagery for arcane knowledge?

Which form for trite truncation?

They would at least let balance sheet be a sonnet

And let debit and credit be in a dialogue

Speaking of the wondrous nature of values

“To debit, I will sojourn”

No, the accountants weren’t poets

Else, they would weave figures into stories

At least for some of us, we would follow.