The XBRL Group was kind enough to provide an example XBRL-based chart of account, so I sent back this email to the list:
That is very helpful! Thank you very much. I'm comparing the examples at GaLaPaGos and the example chart of accounts you just sent to the data model I've created in PBooks. So far, the way PBooks and the way XBRL handle journal entries is similar enough to give me a satisfying feeling of validation. :-) I've modeled the PBooks journal entry data object to be as simple as possible. Two tables, journal_entries, and journal_entry_amounts, with a foreign key relationship between the two. A complete journal entry is comprised of one journal_entries row, and two or more journal_entry_amounts rows, whose credit/debit values sum should to zero. Thanks to what I gleaned from the journal entries XBRL example, I've added a user_id foreign key to the journal_entries table, as well as as a posting_date and a posting_status column to the journal_entry_amounts table. I'm considering adding a "balanced" flag to act as a simple caching mechanism to indicate whether the entry is balanced or not. You can read more about the Pbooks data model here: PBooks Open Source Bookkeeping Data Model Thanks again.