The same ideas, renamed for a ledger
From here on, the words get more product-specific — but don’t let that throw you. The accounting ideas stay exactly the same; only the names change. Here’s the whole bridge in one table: each accounting idea on the left is something concrete in Midaz on the right.
| Accounting idea | In Lerian / Midaz |
|---|---|
| Chart of accounts | The account hierarchy inside a Ledger |
| The five account families (assets, liabilities, equity, revenue, expense) | How you structure and group accounts in that hierarchy |
| Journal entry | A transaction made of operations |
| A single debit or credit line | One operation |
| Double-entry — debits must equal credits | A transaction’s operations always balance |
| Which accounts a kind of entry may touch | An accounting route |
Chart of accounts → the account hierarchy
A chart of accounts is the organized list of buckets a business sorts its money into. In Midaz that idea becomes the account — a container that holds value for a specific asset and carries a balance. Accounts aren’t a flat list: they’re arranged in a hierarchy, so you can nest and group them to mirror how a real business is structured. The five accounting families — assets, liabilities, equity, revenue, expenses — are exactly the kind of grouping that hierarchy is built to express. A Ledger is one self-contained book of records, and an Organization can hold several. So your chart of accounts lives as the structured set of accounts inside a Ledger — the same map of “where value lives,” given room to scale.
Journal entry → transaction + operations
A journal entry records one event as matching debits and credits. Midaz splits that single idea into two precise words you’ll see everywhere in how money moves:
- A transaction is one complete movement of value — the whole event, start to finish. That’s the journal entry.
- An operation is one part of that movement — a single debit or a single credit. Those are the individual lines of the entry.
Double-entry → transactions always balance
The iron rule of accounting — debits must equal credits — is built straight into how Midaz records movement. In a transaction, everything debited must equal everything credited; if the two sides don’t match, the movement won’t go through. A transaction is also all-or-nothing: either every operation succeeds together or none of them do, so the books can never be left half-recorded. This is the same trustworthiness promise the whole guide keeps coming back to — value never appears or vanishes without a recorded reason; every movement has a clear source and a clear destination — now enforced by the system instead of by hand. The core-banking explanation of how money is recorded covers this from the ledger’s side.
Accounting routes → which accounts may take part
In plain accounting you decide by judgment which accounts a given kind of entry should touch; in Midaz that judgment is captured once as an accounting route — a reusable rule that fixes who can send, who can receive, and which debits and credits get recorded — and a fee is just more balanced operations on the same transaction. For example, a wallet transfer’s route fixes which customer account may be debited, which customer account may be credited, and which fee accounts join in when a fee applies. The core-banking guide to routes and fees walks through it in full.
A note on holders and accounts
In Midaz the account is just the balance container, while the real-world owner is a separate holder record and friendly nicknames are aliases — kept deliberately separate so the Ledger’s record of value stays clean. If that distinction matters for your work, who owns what untangles it.
In short
- Midaz implements the accounting you’ve learned — it doesn’t replace it.
- A chart of accounts becomes the account hierarchy inside a Ledger; the five account families are how you group it.
- A journal entry becomes a transaction (the whole movement) made of operations (its individual debits and credits), and those operations always balance.
- An accounting route captures, once, which accounts may take part in a kind of movement — and a fee is just more balanced operations on the same transaction.
Go deeperTo see these entities in full, continue into the Core banking fundamentals, or revisit any idea from the Accounting overview.