Currencies / the accounting equation.

[Al Snell]

On Sun, 1 Oct 2000, Dave Peticolas wrote:

> What if we required transactions to have a common valuation currency?
> What if the currency were associated with transactions instead of
> splits, and we always balanced with the value?

I designed a financial system once - for internal cost accounting in
computer systems where a resource has to be subdivided, eg a process with
a 4Mb memory budget can divide that into budgets of 1Mb for each of three
child processes, then allow the remaining 1Mb to be shared between them if
they go over their budget, with a maximum of 512Kb each... it could track
real external budgets (which could be spent on "expensive" communications
links such as point to point dialup, ordering real products via EDI, etc)
too, along with things like "printer credits" or units that represented
power stored in a battery.

In order to make this flexible enough to be useful, I had to represent a
"value" as a list of currency:amount pairs. Transactions had to balance
seperately in every currency involved.

So my "cash" account could hold 500 dollars, 250 punds, 10 Euros, and a
packet of crisps.

This is handy for asset tracking and expressing manufacturing processes,
too.

ABS

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