Analysis Patterns: Reusable Object Models

6. Inventory and Accounting

A large proportion of commercial computing systems are designed to track the money moving through an enterprise, recording how it is earned and spent. The fundamental idea behind accounting and inventory tracking is that there are various pots of money and goods, and we must record how money and goods move among these pots.

The inventory and accounting patterns in this chapter are born from this fundamental idea. They present a core set of concepts that we can use as the basis for financial accounting, inventory, or resource management. The patterns do not describe these processes directly, rather they describe the underlying ideas from which processes can be built. Chapter 7 describes a simple example that uses these ...