[nabilhat]

It wouldn't be too remarkable if they stopped there. It's not unusual for enterprise-targeted application databases to return nothing when one queries sys.foreign_keys. However, they've done the extra credit work to redefine double entry bookkeeping for some indiscernable reason.

> In fact, for the ease of modeling we relaxed how we reason about it and we don’t stick to standard Double Entry Accounting which has debit-normal and credit normal books which determine the sign as we prefer to consistently treating debits as positive and credits and negative.

Surely some of their customers have competent accountants maintaining the business's books. This unasked-for effort will make their job harder.

[dragonwriter]

The replacement of the debit-normal and credit-normal account structure with simple use of positive and negative numbers is not unprecedented in computerized double-entry accounting systems (ledger-cli and it's ports and offshoots do this, too); it's quite natural since the credit-debit system was itself a hack around the medieval European resistance to negative numbers and a way to reduce subtraction operations by grouping everything into addition of columns of positive numbers and then one substraction of the two column totals.

> Surely some of their customers have competent accountants maintaining the business's books. This unasked-for effort will make their job harder.

Uh, why? It's trivial to present information tracked as positive debits and negative credits in two positive columns; keeping the internal architecture of the database this way should be irrelevant to the end user, it's just avoiding using a hack designed to optimize the experience of people doing a manual process with medieval European technology and attitudes towards negative numbers in an automated backend where none of the problems it mitigates exist in the first place.

[inopinatus]

That’s actually pretty common for payment systems where you care about the journal balancing but every account is basically a liability because it’s all someone else’s money.

You just end up with an apparently negative balance in the income account that represents your own cut due to fees etc. From the GL point of view it looks like a subledger with a contra account but that’s nothing to faze a competent accountant. Back in the 13th century it was probably tricky to represent on an abacus, not so much now.