[wrycoder]

When you first open a business, you put in capital - owner's equity. So the cash account (an asset) increases, and the equity account (a liability) also increases.

In a computerized system, one of these accounts carries a negative balance, the other a positive balance. A choice has to be made - but it's not a matter of good or bad.

There are several implementations of the Ledger system. The transaction registers and GL are human-readable. I looked at Ledger, and assets were positive.

I looked in the code for the GNUCash engine, but there are so many features that I didn't manage to get to the bottom of it w/o spending too much time on it :-)

I do recollect working with low level GC transaction data years ago, and I think I would remember if the assets were negative.

There are a couple of Wikipedia pages with links to FOSS accounting systems.