I spent over ten years inside a $100M manufacturing operation. I knew the floor. I knew the ERP. I knew where every number came from before it ever hit a report.

And yet every time I sat across from my CFO, I quickly became lost in the terminology.

I understood the operational side. "We processed a sale and it's not being recognized in the proper accounts — subcontract isn't reflecting costs." That made sense. I lived that.

But then it would shift. "Account X was debited but I don't see the credit in account Y." "The general ledger isn't balancing correctly." And at that point I felt like a child learning the alphabet for the first time.

I took notes. I read books. I only got more confused.

I kept asking myself — how can you take from one side and add to the other? Simple algebra says you minus on the right and minus on the left. If you debit on the left you must debit on the right. That's how equations work.

And that was exactly the problem.

I was using a logical, mathematical, practical mind to look at something built on historical convention — not pure logic. Accounting didn't evolve from algebra. It evolved from centuries of bookkeepers trying to track what came in and what went out, and the rules calcified into tradition before anyone thought to explain them cleanly.

My CFO would say "it's just pluses and minuses." And he was right. But my pluses and minuses were painting a completely different picture in my head.

The trick — the thing nobody said out loud — is that a debit is sometimes a plus and sometimes a minus. And so is a credit. In math, a variable is one thing. It doesn't switch. In accounting, a debit can actually be a plus or a minus — and so can a credit. It depends on what type of account you're touching. Learning the "depends" is the whole trick.

From speaking with accountants over the years, they almost always leave that part out. They're preprogrammed. "You debit this, you credit that, look — it balances." They treat it as common knowledge. It's the same thing that happens when I explain database schemas and unique identifiers to non-technical people. What feels like common sense inside one head is not common at all to someone standing outside of it.

After a lot of frustration — and a lot of experience — and a very patient CFO — I finally got it.

He was right. It is just pluses and minuses.

The moment I stopped fighting the convention and accepted that the rules are the rules — not because they're mathematically elegant, but because that's how the system was built — everything started to click.

That's what I wish someone had told me at the beginning. Not the rules. The reason the rules feel wrong at first — and why that's not a sign you're bad at this. It's a sign you're thinking about it honestly.

More coming.