7. Accounting

“Accounting may be viewed broadly as a systematic means of writing the economic history of an organization. Its purpose is to provide information that can be drawn upon by those responsible for decisions affecting the organization’s future.”[1]

Accounting is itself a model of an organization. It represents the organization’s activities and resources in a highly structured way, as does any model. It is in fact better at representing certain kinds of situations than is data modeling. To try to draw a data model of the accounting model is fraught with problems. This is not only because of the problems inherent in representing the abstract accounting model in an even more abstract data model, but also because many of the dimensions ...

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