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Our application, a fairly complicated money ledger, has a JSP field for entering a certain type of money due, balanced by payments made towards that amount due. In the application, this field is labeled "Other Payment"

After much discussion about our users' confusion over why their ledger printouts were 'inaccurate', it was decided that we should do away with entering negative numbers into this data field. This field was not designed to take negative numbers, nor are any of our JSP fields supposed to take negative numbers. To allow users to enter 'negative' numbers, we're adding a new field called "Other Unpaid".

I may be called upon in the future to justify this change. Is there any reason, for a java application built on an SQL database foundation, why entering numbers as negative could be bad for our application?

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Because payments aren't negative. Ask any accountant. In most accounting ledgers, this would not only be intuitively incorrect, but physically impossible.

If you want to make a negative payment, you issue a positive credit.

Note that Quickbooks considers this data corruption.

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  • Oh if only I could just say that and have it be done...but sadly, I'm pushing back against people who are 'used to' doing it the other way. Commented May 6, 2015 at 19:17
  • Are "people" the ones that set the requirements? If they are, there's nothing you can do. Commented May 6, 2015 at 19:20
  • People are. They're also the ones who are now complaining about the problems on their documents. Which are happening because of the way they use the application. Commented May 6, 2015 at 19:23
  • I used to work for a company that said "yes" to every customer request, to the point that the application is now this sprawling, byzantine network of features. But I'm pretty sure they put their foot down at negative payments. Commented May 6, 2015 at 19:32

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