This is a useful little acronym in accountancy, you may well learn it when studying financial accounting. It has to do with how you either debit (dr) or credit (cr) an account depending on the type of transaction you are considering.
So ‘DEAR’ stands for ‘Debit any Expense, Asset or Reduction in Liabilities’
and ‘CLID’ stands for ‘Credit any Liability, Income or Decrease in Assets’.
Knowing these will help you make the right choice in nearly all of the journal entries you might make, so if for instance you had a sale for €400 and you put the money in the bank it would be fair to say that
1. the sale is an income (therefore credit ‘sales’) and 2. the cash paid to you is an asset (debit bank or cash).
The idea of placing this money in different named accounts can be tricky once you move beyond a simple cash sale. For instance, if you sold something on credit you would have a ‘trade receivables’ account to debit and you still credit ‘sales’, but only upon payment of …