Structuring Database for Accounting

Anything in the real world with independent existence is called entity such as an object with physical existence (e.g. car, person, house) or conceptual existence (e.g. a company, job, university course, account, voucher). In the context of above accounting reality, there exist five entities: Accounts, Vouchers, Employees, AccountsType and SupportDocuments.

The accounting data is captured through these entities. Attributes are some properties of interest (or characteristics) that further describe the entity such as height, weight and date of birth in case of a person and code and name in case of accounts . An entity has a value for each of its attributes, which is the data stored in the database. There are several types of attributes of an entity that have been described as (i) Composite vs.

Simple (or atomic) attributes : The composite attributes can be divided into smaller sub-parts to represent some more basic attributes with independent meanings. The simple attributes cannot be further sub-divided. For example, Name of a person that is normally sub- divided into First Name, Middle Name and Last Name is a composite attribute. Height of a person is a simple attribute as it is devoid of further sub-division.