Exactly Zero

Dearly Beloved is now engaged in a business venture. He is very nervous about this, because everyone agrees that Dearly Beloved is not the entrepreneurial type. Mostly the problem is that he cannot be trusted with bits of paper. They flutter, willy nilly, from his hands and land in some sort of portable black hole which follows him around just for the purpose of sucking up important bits of paper and whisking them off to the Antipodes.

Bits of paper are, as we all know, the soul of entrepreneurship. Okay, not its soul; but maybe its digestive system. My better half bears the same relationship to organization that a box of figs has to a Monster Truck Rally, okay?

Happily for him, his wife is an obsessive compulsive nutburger as regards bits of paper. Sometimes I scan them and put them on my hard drive and sometimes I file them and sometimes I put them in big old honking D-ring binders with tabs and indexes. SOmetimes I even color code them. Very occasionally I throw away a bit of paper; but not often. I do not, however, lose bits of paper.

Also happily for him, his wife has been doing bookkeeping for small businesses since she could sharpen a pencil and legibly write the same thing in three different books with columns in them. Unhappily for him, the program he bought to keep his books is, erahem, in Dutch.

Well, of course it is; this is Holland. It is his native language. He figured with a little translation, this could all be worked out. So it went like this:

HE: See, I can't get it to come out right, this entry comes up twice so it shows I have paid this amount two times.

SHE: Well, you put it in your Accounts payable and also in your checkbook as a payment. So you did pay it twice. You have to put in a correcting entry in one or the other to move one of them from the debit to the credit column.

HE: I can't; it's already in the Big Book.

SHE: The what?

HE: The Big Book, you now, the Big Book.

SHE: The Big Book is a collection of fairy tales, what are you talking about?

HE: see, when you input the numbers it calculates the btw....

SHE: The what?

HE: The btw, it's a product.

SHE: uh huh. The by the way? The electronics store? The what?

HE: It's an acronym, it stands for >incomprehensible, mind numbingly long string of gibberish which apparently translates to the value added tax<

SHE: Uh huh, does that actually mean something?

HE: Yeah, it means the VAT.

SHE: Right. Why does it calculate the VAT?

I think we should draw the curtain over this little domestic scene at this point. Suffice it to say that Dearl Beloved is not so happy as I am to simply put in entries which say "correction of previous idiotic error" in order to make it all come out the way it should. He wants to knwo why. And there is no why, there is only do, as they say. However, this ultimately futile conversation somehow led to the following inquiry from my spouse: Why do the columns have to add up to zero?

I have never known the answer to this question. It is just an Ultimate Truth; as the sun rises and sets, as little pitchers have big ears, as what goes up must come down, the Columns Must Add Up to Zero. They may not flirt with an amusing little taste of +.75 or display a shocking lack of good taste with a -.47. Absolute Zero is required. If it does not add up to zero, you must perforce invent something else to put in (referring to your complete Chart of Accounts for the proper coding) in one column or another to make it equal zero. I am the only person I know who had once an entry in the chart of accounts for "Adjustment to make everything equal zero and keep Bruce happy". Bruce thought it was funny; I have not had occasion to check Warren's opinion.

Anyone with a good answer which will satisfy the existential wonderings of my spouse, please feel free. I am a practical person; "because otherwise the accountant becomes very unhappy" was always good enough for me.