As mentioned, an account is a series of letters and/or numbers that mean a kind of transaction. If you’ve filed an expense report, you may have had to break your expenses up among various internal account numbers, like for meals, transportation, etc.? It’s an identification title for where the money went.
A ledger did in fact use to be a physical book, but now it’s a module within financial software. The General Ledger (G/L) is the central main “book” that holds all financial information, some in detail and some as summaries from other ledgers. Other ledgers that feed the G/L (sometimes called subledgers) are things like Payroll (P/R), Accounts Payable (A/P), Inventory, Procurement, Billing/Accounts Receivable (A/R). Financial transactions happen in these other ledgers and get fed into the G/L for financial statement purposes.
For your purposes for the moment, forget debit and credit. You just need to know the total number you might pay out. The accountants will know how to record the transaction using your numbers. The basic idea is:
Balance Sheet
Assets (Cash, A/R, prepaid expenses, land, buildings…) An increase is a Debit (Dr), A decrease is a Credit (Cr)
Liabilities (Loans, A/P, Vacation payout…) An increase is a Credit, A decrease is a Debit
**Income Statement (Profit and Loss) **
Expenses – An increase is a Debit (Dr), A Decrease is a Credit (Cr)
Revenue – An increase is a Credit, A decrease is a Debit
Some of this feels right (decrease in expense is a credit – like when goods are returned to the vendor you get a credit memo) but some feels backward (a decrease in cash is a credit). I started to put the positive and negative signs for each, but that’s even more confusing!