Anything Financial can benefit from Pacioli's treatise (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luca_Pacioli http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luca_Pacioli) :)! If you modelin

Anything Financial can benefit from Pacioli's treatise (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luca_Pacioli http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luca_Pacioli) :)! If you modeling using a spreadsheet or by pulling records off a database or an old and ancient ledger the method is the same: - When you Purchase debit stock, credit Creditor - When you Pay debit Creditor, credit Bank - When you Sell credit stock, debit customer + debit profit (difference between sales price and purchase price) - When you receive the money (if you selling on credit) credit debtor, debit bank When I started in coding normal accounting methods seemed long and convoluted! However, as the years went by I discovered that this is the easier way to visualize the flow of financial transcactions and it automatically caters for time. We should call any db based on this as a Pacioli's Datastructure:) As a bonus, the method includes a test. The sum of all the above transcactions === 0;