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    <blockquote> <p>How would you store these values, and why?</p> </blockquote> <p>I would store them as <em>a single column</em>. Despite your desire to separate the data into multiple columns, anyone who understands accounting or bookkeeping will know that the dollar value of a transaction is one thing, not two separate things based on whether it's income or expense (or asset, liablity, equity and so forth).</p> <p>As someone who's actually written fully balanced double-entry accounting applications and less formal budgeting applications, I suggest you rethink your decision. It will make future work on this endeavour a lot easier.</p> <p>I'm sorry, that's probably not what you want to hear and may well result in ngative rep for me but I can't, in all honesty, let this go without telling you what a mistake it will be.</p> <p>Your "thoughts so far" are an indication of the problems already appearing.</p> <p>1/ "Having seperate columns might be more difficult to maintain (what happens if we end up with a 1 in both columns?" - well, this shouldn't happen. Data is supposed to be internally consistent to the data model. You would be best advised preventing it with an insert/update trigger or, say, a single column that didn't allow it to happen :-)</p> <p>2/ "Lookup might be easier with a single column, but there is a risk of mistaking 0 (false, expense) for null (unknown)." - no mistake possible if the sign is stored with the magnitude of the value. And the whole idea of not knowing whether an item is expense or income is abhorrent to accountants. That knowledge exists when the transaction is created, it's not something that is nebulous until some point after a transaction happens.</p>
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    1. COTo make sure I understand, you are suggesting not having any extra income/expense columns, and instead just using whether the cash value is positive or negative to decide? Don't apologise, advice backed by experience is exactly what I was looking for.
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    2. COYes, I am suggesting that. Having a signed value for income/expense items (and asset/liablity/equity in double entry systems, despite the non-intuitive signs that laymen have trouble wrapping their heads around) will make your life a lot easier. I wasn't sure whether you had a valid reason for wanting them separate that I wasn't seeing (although I've never found one myself) hence the apologies in advance.
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    3. COWhat you are saying makes a lot of sense now. I am typically dealing with projected future transactions, rather than actual real transactions, but regardless I think following your advice will make life a lot easier. Thanks.
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