 the financial statements. Note that I have represented the credits with brackets. That is not always the case. Depends on the textbook or the software you will see. Most textbooks will not represent credits with brackets, but many software programs will. And if you work with Excel, I highly, highly recommend, you know, considering this kind of formatting, because it will make your life much, much easier. And so I'm going to, I'm going to try to, to show that and try to convince people, convince you of that. If you're going to be working with Debits of Credits a lot, you're going to want to work with Excel. You're going to want to learn Excel. You're going to want to make sure that you make Excel part of your learning process. And when learning Excel, it'll make your life much, much, much, much easier. If you start using formulas and putting credit brackets around the credits will help to do that. The first example of that is to, if we were trying to convince the trial, condense a trial balance down, we can do so in this format. And note what this does for us, it's going to convert the trial balance from just two columns to one column. That seems like not a big deal right now. But when we get to later worksheets, where we're going to basically be looking at the activity that happens and then an ending trial balance, that would be six columns here. And if we can condense those down, we're getting down to three columns. So the fact that this will increase by two columns each time we add something, and this will increase by only one column each time we add something is really going to save time down the road, as you'll see when we, when we start making worksheets, you'll see worksheets in the book and textbooks that will, you know, have like 10, you know, 10 columns, and that's a little unnecessary. We'll also see some complexity in formulas where if we were doing it by hand, it might be useful to do if we had a calculator. But if we're doing it in Excel, something I highly, highly, highly recommend we get used to, then then the formulas will be a lot more simple if we don't have the two columns and instead use this format here. So I'm going to try to convince us of this and show us in the problems how this will work and how to convert this back to this and back and forth as needed. And that's a typical kind of thing that we will be using in practice too. And we're going to have, in this case, the debits are going to be just the positive numbers, the credits we're going to represent with brackets, Excel seeing those as negative numbers. And therefore, we know that of course, if the debits equal the credits, then if I subtracted debits and credits, that would equal zero. So if we then make the credits zero, the negative numbers, we can check our balance simply by summing up this row in Excel, meaning summing up would take all the positive numbers, minus all the negative numbers. And that will show us we are in balance by it being zero. The pros of that is it's going to give us a really quick indication if that's any other number than zero, we're out of balance as opposed to us having to kind of look at these two where we could kind of miss where we're out of balance. The con of that is of course that we can't define exactly how many debits or credits we have, but typically that's not the important information we're looking at here. The total debits and credits don't give us any information about how the company's doing. It just tells us whether we're in balance or not. The number that we want to know, here's net income at the bottom. A number much easier to calculate right here, we can just add it to the trial balance if we want to. If we use this format, because it'll just calculate that's the calculation of this credit minus these debits, meaning that is income. Now that is not a loss. Now that's going to be what we have to do whenever we learn debits and credits is to understand the difference between what a debit and a credit is, as opposed to the functions of plus and minus. And there's no way to get around that whether we use formulas with brackets and negative numbers as credits or not. You're going to have to add and subtract debits and credits. So the idea of not having negative numbers or not having bracketed numbers, reducing the problem of having to distinguish between debits and credits and plus and minus, I don't think is going to work really. We're going to have to, no matter what we do, we're going to have debits and credits. We're going to be adding and subtracting debits and credits. And we're going to have to keep straight in our mind. What does a debit and credit mean? Am I looking at something in terms of debits and credits? Or am I looking at something in terms of a plus and minus operation format? And so we're going to have to keep that straight as we go. And we'll do that by just having a bunch of problems that we're going to work through in order to get that information. We are now able to define a trial balance, list components of a trial balance, and explain how a trial balance is used.