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When you say "it is the norm in the industry" do you mean that accountants are moving away from debits and credits, or is it just that accounting software translates to signed numbers when dealing with non-accounting software such as databases and spreadsheets?

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It is totally normal to display debits and credits on screen in gui software as signed numbers too. It is very convenient to be able to sum a list and find a balance. It also means that the sum of the entire ledger must always be zero which is a common consistency check that is applied. This is how it is in SAP, Coda, Sage and Netsuite at least.

Thanks for these comments, good to know!

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