Grant Fritchey (11/10/2008)
Not unless I've missed it to. If the value of a number is -3, it's -3, not 3 with some negative sign kept elsewhere that may or may not change it. That's a bit of a freaky design. Although, I'd have to check with an accounting friend for the details, I think there is a method of accounting whereby you designate everything as a value and then describe the value as either a credit or debit, + or -, maybe that's what you're dealing with.
The technique that you are talking about is quite widely used in accounting applications. I remember doing the same thing myself. You take the sum of all debits & multiply it with -1 , take sum of all credits and then just the sum the total of debits and credits to get the current amount. I think this is quite efficient too. But i beleive this can be applied only to some scenarios accounting being one. Otherwise a negative values needs to stored as negative.
You do not store either credit or debit values as negative becoz u need to take these values and show them in various reports .This would need multiplying with -1 each time before showing a report.
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