Oracle General Ledger uses double-entry accounting, in which every transaction has two journal entries: a debit entry and a credit entry.

Thus, for every transaction, there are two accounts, represented as columns. The two accounts must balance; in other words, the sum of debit column must equal the sum of the credit column.

A debit member can be specified, to which the custom calculation writes positive result values, and a credit member can be specified, to which the custom calculation writes negative and offsetting result values. The debit member and the credit member must be two different members from the same dimension. For example, a dimension called “AmountType” may have two level 0 children named “Credit” and “Debit.”

Whenever the calculation would result in writing a positive number to a level 0 cell in the target cube, the positive value is written to the debit member.

Whenever the calculation would result in writing a negative number to a level 0 cell in the target cube, the sign is changed to a positive and is written to the credit member.