# Debit and Credit on Bank Statement: What Each Means

- Author: FastBankConvert (https://fastbankconvert.com)
- Published: 2026-10-17
- Category: Bank statements to Excel and CSV
- Canonical: https://fastbankconvert.com/blog/debit-and-credit-on-bank-statement

> What debit and credit on a bank statement mean, why they look reversed from a bookkeeping view, and which sign to give each in your sheet.
On a bank statement, a debit is money taken out of your account and a credit is money paid in. A card purchase, a cheque or a fee is a debit; a salary payment, a refund or interest is a credit. In a spreadsheet, give credits a positive sign and debits a negative one so the balance adds up.

## Debit and credit on a bank statement, in one line each

A debit on a bank statement reduces your balance; a credit increases it. That holds for checking and savings accounts everywhere the words are used. The statement may label the columns Debit and Credit, Withdrawals and Deposits, Paid out and Paid in, or Dr and Cr, but the meaning is the same.

### Everyday examples

Debits include card purchases, cash withdrawals, cheques you wrote, bill payments, transfers out and bank fees. Credits include wages, transfers in, deposits, refunds from merchants and interest the bank pays you.

### A card statement is different

A credit card statement uses the words from the other side. A charge increases what you owe, and a payment or refund is shown as a credit that reduces it. So a credit on a card statement still means "in your favour", but the account it applies to is a debt, not savings.

## Why does a bank statement credit look reversed to a bookkeeper?

A bank statement is written from the bank's books, where your deposit is money the bank owes you. In double-entry bookkeeping, money owed to someone grows with a credit. In your own books, the same cash is an asset, and assets grow with a debit. Both are right; they describe one event from two sides.

### The same event, two ledgers

The table shows four example lines, with invented amounts, as each side records them.

| Example line | Statement label | Bank's books | Your books (bank account) | Signed amount in a sheet |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Salary paid in, 2,000.00 | Credit | Credit, it owes you more | Debit, cash goes up | 2,000.00 |
| Card purchase, 45.00 | Debit | Debit, it owes you less | Credit, cash goes down | -45.00 |
| Monthly fee, 5.00 | Debit | Debit | Credit | -5.00 |
| Interest paid, 1.20 | Credit | Credit | Debit | 1.20 |

### Why it matters

If you keep books and enter statement lines by copying the bank's labels, every entry lands on the wrong side. Bookkeeping software that imports bank data handles the flip for you. When you type entries by hand, read the statement's credit as a debit to your bank account and the statement's debit as a credit to it.

## Which sign should a statement debit and credit get in Excel?

For a spreadsheet of a checking or savings account, make credits positive and debits negative. Then the opening balance plus the sum of every amount equals the closing balance, and a running balance is a single addition per row. Mixing signs, or keeping both as positive numbers in one column, breaks every total.

### From two columns to one

When debits and credits arrive in separate columns, a formula such as `=N(D2)-N(C2)`, with Debit in C and Credit in D, gives one signed amount per row. N treats a blank cell as zero.

### Card sheets

On a sheet for a card account alone, many people keep charges positive and payments negative, matching the statement. If you combine card and bank rows in one sheet, flip the card amounts so money spent is negative on both.

### Bank-specific layouts

Each bank prints these columns in its own way. Two walkthroughs show what that looks like in practice: [Chase bank statements in Excel](/blog/chase-bank-statement-to-excel) and the guide to [Bank of America statements and their grouped sections](/blog/bank-of-america-statement-to-excel), where the direction comes from the section heading rather than a column.

## Debit and credit markers that converters misread

Some statements mark direction with symbols rather than columns: CR or DR after the number, brackets around a debit, or a minus sign printed after the figure. These are easy for a person to read and easy for software to drop, which turns a debit into a credit without any visible error.

### The common markers

- **CR and DR suffixes**, as in `250.00 CR`. The suffix may sit in its own narrow column that a converter merges with the next field or loses.
- **Brackets**, as in `(45.00)`, meaning a debit. Excel may keep these as text.
- **Trailing minus**, as in `45.00-`, which Excel does not read as negative.
- **Colour only**, such as debits in red, which disappears entirely in a text conversion.

### How to catch a lost marker

Run a running balance against the printed balance. A row whose marker was lost produces a gap of exactly twice its amount, because it moved the balance the wrong way. How a parser reads those suffixes and columns is covered in [how a bank statement parser reads a statement](/blog/bank-statement-parser). On scanned statements, small marks like brackets and minus signs are also where character recognition struggles most, which the comparison of [the best OCR for bank statements](/blog/best-ocr-for-bank-statements) looks at.

FastBankConvert, now getting ready to open, is built to tell you before download when a statement's balances do not add up, which is the symptom a lost marker leaves; [Get started](/get-started) to hear when trials begin.