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Re: Guides for communicating with business accounting systems

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On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 1:02 AM, Ben Finney <ben+python@benfinney.id.au> wrote:
> What I want is pointers to a putative “What every programmer needs to
> know about storing commercial transactions for business accounting”
> general guide.
>
> Does that information already exist where I can point our team to it?

Not a guide per se, but a keyword to look for: ACID compliance. You'll
be maintaining multiple pieces of information that depend on each
other (simple example being a ledger table showing transactions and an
accounts table holding balances), and you need to guarantee that the
database is consistent.

Log aggressively. I'm sure nobody would ever dream of maintaining
customer balances without an associated ledger showing how that
balance came to be; it's less obvious but just as helpful in many
other areas. If anything happens to corrupt your data, you should be
able to recognize from internal evidence that something's wrong.

GST isn't particularly complicated, but again, be really REALLY clear
what's going on. It's better to be massively verbose in the database
and then squash things down for display than to be left wondering,
when you trace back through things, what money went where. Be aware of
your ninths/elevenths; when there's 10% tax in a $10 item, the ex tax
price is $9.090909... which will annoy everyone with 1c errors.

Don't use MySQL. :) Okay, that's hardly a *rule*, but it's a strong
recommendation.

ChrisA

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Thread

Guides for communicating with business accounting systems Ben Finney <ben+python@benfinney.id.au> - 2012-09-14 01:02 +1000
  Re: Guides for communicating with business accounting systems Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> - 2012-09-14 01:30 +1000
    Re: Guides for communicating with business accounting systems Ben Finney <ben+python@benfinney.id.au> - 2012-09-14 16:28 +1000
      Re: Guides for communicating with business accounting systems Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> - 2012-09-14 16:36 +1000
        Re: Guides for communicating with business accounting systems Walter Hurry <walterhurry@lavabit.com> - 2012-09-14 14:54 +0000
  Re: Guides for communicating with business accounting systems Emile van Sebille <emile@fenx.com> - 2012-09-13 09:16 -0700

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