is true because L and E are Credit dollars and A is Debit dollars. And the total Debit is equal to the total Credit.
But instead of using debit and credit unsigned dollars, you can use negative numbers: Credit is Positive, Debit negative.
In that case
(-Assets) = Liabilities + Equity, so A+L+E=0
-Assets because you've made those debit dollars negative.
In fact you don't even have to remember which. Sum(Everything)=0. 'Balancing' means summing to 0.
The software I am aware of that does large-scale double entry calculations for large banks works this way (I did some consulting 15 years ago on data laundering for that system). And all those accounting rules about what accounts are debit or credit accounts, whether a credit increases the debit account, etc, it all isn't needed at a low-level. The confusing bits are only in the UI. Where a number stored as -10 is displayed as 10DB, while +10 becomes 10CR.
So it's definitely not 'just simple maths'. It is the convention you use to express numbers: turning debit numbers into positive, and having rules to keep the math consistent in other places. And since the original article was aimed 'at developers', I think that the widespread negative number format is much stronger.
is true because L and E are Credit dollars and A is Debit dollars. And the total Debit is equal to the total Credit.
But instead of using debit and credit unsigned dollars, you can use negative numbers: Credit is Positive, Debit negative.
In that case
(-Assets) = Liabilities + Equity, so A+L+E=0
-Assets because you've made those debit dollars negative.
In fact you don't even have to remember which. Sum(Everything)=0. 'Balancing' means summing to 0.
The software I am aware of that does large-scale double entry calculations for large banks works this way (I did some consulting 15 years ago on data laundering for that system). And all those accounting rules about what accounts are debit or credit accounts, whether a credit increases the debit account, etc, it all isn't needed at a low-level. The confusing bits are only in the UI. Where a number stored as -10 is displayed as 10DB, while +10 becomes 10CR.
So it's definitely not 'just simple maths'. It is the convention you use to express numbers: turning debit numbers into positive, and having rules to keep the math consistent in other places. And since the original article was aimed 'at developers', I think that the widespread negative number format is much stronger.