Just like the tech business, accounting uses loads of acronyms and seemingly undecipherable names, but the basics are actually really simple. I’m not saying that accounting in and of itself is simple, but rather that the concept is quite understandable and convenient if you approach it correctly.
The goal of this post is to provide a basic understanding of the basic principles of accounting, which a lot of tech people (particularly in the database business) will at some point encounter.
Last week, we looked at how to construct a visual representation of a hierarchy stored as a parent-child table. The obvious next step is to accumulate values stored on those nodes using this hierarchy.
When you’re designing reports, they can often be based on hiearchies represented by “nodes” in a parent-child setup. To the end-user, the parent-child representation doesn’t provide very much readability, so you need to output this information in a human-readable form, for instance in a table where the names/titles are indented.