Re: Stuck Up In My Category Tree

On Aug 23, 2011, at 11:17 AM, Don Parris wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 17, 2011 at 19:31, Don Parris <parrisdc(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>> I now have a work-around. I have a view called amntby_cat that contains
> the sums by category, which I pull into a LibreOffice Calc sheet. I then
> use a second sheet with a list of the top-level categories, and a series of
> formulas to sum all the sub-categories for each top-level category,
>
> I am now curious as to how business accounting databases approach
> transaction categories? If I am selling widgets to all 7 continents (as i
> learned them), I might have sales as follows:

An approach I've seen before is to encode things into a department id. All North American departments start with 1, etc. The rollups are then done by truncating the id down to the granularity required. At least this was the approach my previous employer took. They were more interested in particular customers, so the encoding was based on that. This was on a relatively small scale basis (~500 employees and few enough customers to count by hand). I'm not sure how well that would scale. It definitely takes some planning and forethought.

Brent D.