Re: Thoughts on Voiding Invoices

[David Tangye <..hidden..>]

On Mon, 2006-09-25 at 16:09 -0700, Chris Travers wrote:
> Accounting systems multiply entities in ways which
> most DBA's would think was needless,
Do they? Its a physical design issue, handled differently by DBAs
depending on lots of issues. Simple accounting packages like MYOB and
Quickbooks do it because of the severe limitations imposed by their
DBMS.

>  but this duplication handles
> issues of error detection and the like.
Yes: its a physical design issue.

> 
> Most of this argument is about this aspect.  I.e. if you void an
> invoice because it was never valid, your data should be to a state as
> if that invoice was never issued in the first place.  This means that
> items that are of comparable cost and revenue are rolled up into the
> earlier transactions and so forth.  Hence the last unallocated cost
> rule (items of comparable cost and revenue are generally treated as
> bulk items according to this system for reasons I outlined in a
> previous post).
Agreed. A good DBMS like postgres can handle all this using triggers.
its actually very simple SQL in a well-designed database.