Definition
A banking practice in which a note or bill deposited with a bank for collection is recorded in the customer's passbook in a provisional inner column rather than credited to the customer's general account balance. The amount is not carried out to the running balance—and thus does not become available to the customer as ordinary funds—until the note is actually paid by the party obligated on it.
The entry is, in other words, conditional: it acknowledges the deposit of the instrument without treating the customer as having received the money. Only upon successful collection does the entry "come out" into the main account.
Common Confusion
Short entry should not be confused with short-form merger, a distinct corporate law procedure by which a parent corporation absorbs a subsidiary with minimal formality. The word "short" in both terms signals a truncated or provisional procedure, but the fields, doctrines, and legal frameworks are entirely unrelated. The proximity of the term in a general search may produce irrelevant results from corporate law sources.
Why It Matters in Research
Short entry is a narrow, historically specific term tied to nineteenth-century banking practice. Researchers encountering it in primary sources—commercial disputes, bank ledger litigation, deposit contract cases—should understand that it describes a bookkeeping convention, not a legal doctrine per se. Its legal significance arose when customers and banks disputed whether a credited note counted as a final deposit (making the bank liable for the funds regardless of collection success) or remained a contingent item. The short-entry custom was invoked to defeat claims that the bank owed the customer the face amount before collection was complete.
The term is unlikely to appear in modern banking law, which has displaced passbook conventions with statutory frameworks governing provisional credit and availability of funds. Researchers working in the modern context should look instead to Regulation CC (12 C.F.R. Part 229) and UCC Article 4 for the contemporary analogs to this concept. Short entry surfaces almost exclusively in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century commercial law reporters and banking treatises.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four shelf sources agree on the core meaning but vary in precision. Black's (both editions) offers the most concise formulation: the amount is entered but not carried to the customer's "general balance" until paid. Bouvier's adds useful structural detail, distinguishing between the "inner column" where the entry is initially made and the outer accounts between the parties where it appears only after collection—a description that maps directly onto the ledger format then in use.
Rapalje & Lawrence's entry is truncated in the available text and runs together with an unrelated headnote ("SHORTEN LIFE, DISORDER TENDING TO"), suggesting a typographical artifact of the source edition rather than substantive content. It contributes little beyond confirming the term's existence in the standard reference vocabulary of the period.
Black's (2nd Ed.) is notable for citing Giles v. Perkins, 9 East 12, and Blaine v. Bourne, 11 R.I. 121 (1875)—the latter reported at 23 Am. Rep. 429—as case authority. Researchers wanting the judicial treatment of this custom should begin there. None of the historical sources address what happens to the short entry if the note is dishonored, a gap that the case law fills.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The encyclopedia entries flagged as potentially related—arraignment and plea, short-form mergers, and future interests—share only superficial linguistic overlap with this term and are not substantively connected. No Law Mind Encyclopedia entry directly addresses nineteenth-century banking deposit practice or provisional credit customs. Researchers should treat this term as corpus-specific to commercial law primary sources and historical banking treatises.