Re: This table strikes me as wrong - could someone explain why?

On Tue, 21 Oct 2003 13:39:21 +0100, Paul wrote:

        [snip]
>
> 2) The table structure proposed by me was like this:
>
> ----------------------------------------------- Ac_ID Tr_Date Tr_Month
> Tr_Type Amount 1 02/01/2003 1 CR 100 1
> 03/01/2003 1 CR 320 2 03/01/2003 1 CR 500
> -----------------------------------------------
>
>
> Is there not a problem in the fact that the column Tr_Month contains
> data which is already present in the column Tr_Date, and therefore that
> introduces a redundancy and hence the table is not properly normalised?
>

    [ snip ]

As to your question about Transaction Date and Transaction Month. The former is the actual calendar date. The latter is the accounting month in which that date falls. This is valid since many businesses deviate from the calendar in order to have data which is comparable from year to year. (Two popular schemes are dividing the year into 4 quarters each of which has 2 months of 4 weeks and 1 of 5 weeks and the use of a calendar with 13 4-week months.)

A more common situation is the use of adjusting, closing, and reversing entries made when the books are closed at the end of a period. In general due to time lag the transactions are entered some time after the last day of the period, but apply to the period. Received on Tue Oct 21 2003 - 15:33:15 CEST