So that's what it's for! (a boring post)

I've been accused of being borderline autistic, because I can focus obsessively on something until it's done. This is why I've been blogging very little (I think I've mentioned it before): I suddenly discovered I needed to write an accountancy program to combine with something else I was doing and because it was an afterthought I needed to get it out of the way quickly.

It's been about the only thing I've been thinking about recently, unless you count the scripted attacks on the Joomla sites I host that meant I had to do an emergency upgrade of the web servers to cope with a 'maxClients exceeded' prob.

But that was a mere bagatelle. Accounts programmes aren't so much difficult as exact. Click 'enter' and all these posting happen and if you've made a mistake, there's a rats' nest to untangle. Because of an error in the way I was finding a particular nominal ledger account reference, the sales ledger balanced, the purchase ledger balanced, the whole postings table balanced, but the nominal ledger didn't balance. Huh?

I'd based the database design on some ideas in a paper I found at the ICA website and it naturally enough included a journal, which I've always thought of as being somewhat superfluous. Nope. It isn't. The journal reference ties together all the ledger postings so they can be balanced as a group.

Ah. So that's what it's for. I guess my complete lack of accountancy training is showing.