Let me explain my update from yesterday so it doesn't just hang there as a useless tease. My comment assumed that double-entry accounting meant that every tran

Let me explain my update from yesterday so it doesn't just hang there as a useless tease. My comment assumed that double-entry accounting meant that every transaction adds up to zero. But cgio links to which claims http://www.ellerman.org/the-math-of-double-entry-bookkeeping-part-i-scalars/ http://www.ellerman.org/the-math-of-double-entry-bookkeeping... that definition is a common misunderstanding. What cgio means by double-entry is adding up debits and credits as separate unsigned numbers, as opposed to a single signed one. The fact that the numbers only ever increase can help you verify the books. Indeed I've experienced the pain of signed numbers first hand when keeping accounts with pen-and-paper. I can't remember how exactly it worked, but it was something to do with how if I had monotonically increasing values, I could have put a strict time bound on where a missing entry had to be.