Chez Betty is, at its core, a transaction management system. Every action performed by a user or admin is recorded as an event with one or more associated transactions. Transactions move money between accounts, or, in some cases, from outside of the system to an account or from an account to outside of the system. Each transaction is labeled with a transaction type, allowing the system to track where money is going or coming from.
Chez Betty has two types of accounts: cash and virtual. Cash accounts hold actual, physical money. Virtual accounts hold money as it flows through Chez Betty, but no actual USD changes hands. This two-account system allows for natural support of the deposit based model. By separating cash from internal transactions, we can easily track how much we have received in deposits as well as how much users should be debited for purchases.
There are five accounts in the Chez Betty system:
| Virtual Acocunts | Description |
|---|---|
| chezbetty | General account |
| users | A series of accounts that hold each user's balance |
| Cash Acocunts | Description |
|---|---|
| chezbetty | Chez Betty bank account |
| cashbox | How much cash there should be in the dropbox |
| btcbox | How much cash we should be able to convert our bitcoins to |
To demonstrate how the accounts work, take a user deposit as an example. Say Bob wants to deposit $5 into his account. He puts $5 in the drop box and enters $5 into the deposit page. This creates a transaction:
Transaction:
amount: 5.00
type: deposit
virtual accounts:
from: null
to: bob
cash accounts
from: null
to: cashbox
At this point Bob's user account has $5.00 in it and we record that there should be $5 cash in the dropbox by putting money in the cashbox account.
Now, of course, we don't actually know how much money is in the dropbox for sure. Therefore, we must reconcile the cashbox actual versus what we think should be in there. We do this by telling Chez Betty how much was actually in the box. Say Bob wasn't very nice and only put $4 in the drop box. Reconciling this creates two transactions:
Transaction 1:
amount: 1.00
type: lost
virtual accounts:
from: null
to: null
cash accounts:
from: cashbox
to: null
Transaction 2:
amount: 4.00
type: emptycashbox
virtual accounts:
from: null
to: null
cash accounts:
from: cashbox
to: chezbetty
Transaction 1 reconciles the cashbox's expected value and what was actually in it. To keep the accounting correct, we must move $1.00 from the cashbox account to null and label it "lost". Then, we move the actual cashbox contents to the chezbetty cash account.