The Design of Entity-Relationship Models for General Ledger Systems

Abstract General ledger systems, though not often discussed in the database literature, are fundamental to the operation of any business and illustrate many of the subtleties of database design. We present here an application of the entity-relationship model design methodology to general ledger systems. Introductions to the terminology of both entity-relationship models and general ledger accounting systems are given, in order to make the paper relatively self-contained.