Re:Accounting For Developers, Part I
by wruza on Wednesday August 17, 2022 @04:29PM
(#32501325)
But it’s the 21st century and we have negative numbers now - why not just use positive and negative numbers?
Because debit and credit may be looked at differently in fee calculation. You may not be able to un-debit the same amount easily. This is just a historical/established practice, but you cannot squash the two into +/-, because you would lose “cancellation” in cases when a mistake is discovered but the quarter is done and already git-pushed to IRS/etc. See “storno (accounting)”.
Because debit and credit may be looked at differently in fee calculation. You may not be able to un-debit the same amount easily. This is just a historical/established practice, but you cannot squash the two into +/-, because you would lose “cancellation” in cases when a mistake is discovered but the quarter is done and already git-pushed to IRS/etc. See “storno (accounting)”.