Analogies to Personal Life
Think of your personal life. You go to work, and you get paid. Let's say your salary was $1,000 for the week. When you get paid, you get a check for $1,000 (let's forget about taxes to make the example simple). Journal entries always contain at least one debit and one credit, and the total of the debits equals the total of the credits. So what needs to be recorded? You now have $1,000, so that has to be recorded—we have to increase the balance in the Cash account (also called the checking account). We increase Cash by debiting it, so that is the first part of the journal entry: a debit to Cash.
We can't stop there, because now we need a credit in order to balance the entry. Let's think about this. We got $1,000 because ...
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