Dimensions?

[Christopher Browne]

On Tue, 26 Sep 2000 09:27:51 +1000, the world broke into rejoicing as
"Phillip Shelton" <shelton@usq.edu.au>  said:
> No it is not a split. The shoes cost $50 so I want to have the clothes
> account debited with $50 and the shoes account debited with $50 and the bank
> account credited with $50.

What you're probably looking for is the notion of "account roll-ups," or
"account hierarchy."

The above situation does _not_ involve having 3 $50 amounts; it only
involves 2.

What you have is something like:
                           DR     CR
Clothing: Shoes            $50
Bank Account                     $50

Where the account structure isn't just a list, but a tree, where you
have a "main account," Clothing, and a "subaccount," Clothing:Shoes,
which is a child of Clothing.

The $50 is associated with "Clothing:Shoes," and is associated with all
the parents moving on up the tree.

If we have balances in various clothing-related accounts, we can look
at them directly:

Clothing: Shoes: $150
Clothing: Hats:   $75
Clothing: Pants: $225
Clothing: Socks:  $25

Or we can "roll them up," to get
Clothing:        $475

The chart of accounts provides a tree that allows rolling things up
to ignore as much detail as you want to ignore.  :-)

The problem comes in when you try to decide what to do with the
"parent" accounts, whether to:
 a) Mandate that transactions can only be associated with the "leaf"
    nodes, or
 b) Allow transactions to be attached to any node.

There are arguments cutting both ways...
--
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