Storing Negative Numbers - Database Design?

I would concur with Catcall and HLGEM. Much better to store them as signed numbers, especially if you're going to do reports that will calculate summaries (aggregates). Having to infer the sign based on another field would make your reports a lot more complex than they should be.

Also, many financial functions will require signed numbers (for calculating interest rates for example), and having to derive them from another field would again add some unnecessary complexity.

It's better to store positive numbers as positive numbers, and negative numbers as negative numbers. If you don't do that up front, you'll end up creating a bunch of views that fix up the numbers, and rewriting application code to use the views.

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