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Double-entry bookkeeping means every transaction touches at least two accounts — record a $5,000 donation, and cash (an asset) goes up by $5,000 while contribution revenue also goes up by $5,000. Debits must equal credits on every single journal entry; if they don’t, the entry can’t post, which is one of the oldest and most reliable error-catching mechanisms in accounting.

In fund accounting, a journal entry also needs a fund assignment on every line before it can post — a $5,000 restricted grant deposit has to hit that grant’s fund, not a generic operating fund, or the organization loses the ability to track what it can still spend that money on.

Most journal entries are generated automatically by day-to-day activity — an invoice paid, a donation processed through a CRM integration — but manual journal entries (accruals, corrections, month-end adjustments) deserve extra scrutiny, since they bypass the usual transactional checks and are a common audit focus area.