Advice on handling positive and negative decimals?

[pbreit]

What's the prevailing best practice for storing financial debits and credits in the DB?

1 table of both or 2 tables (1 for each)?

1 column of positive and negative values or 2 columns (amount and type)?

store as integers (cents) or decimals (dollars)?

[villas]

I have given this quite a bit of thought in the past.  In the end,  I decided one column of decimals,  positive and negative does a good job.  It has always worked well for me and I have never had any reason to doubt it was the right thing to do. 

There are no doubt other opinions, and other circumstances,  YMMV :)