title: Personal finance app database design
body: <p>After searching around for a minimalistic money tracking/budgeting app, I decided to build one for my own personal use.</p>
  
  <p>However I'm unsure with part of the database design. Basically at the moment, I have an entries table which obviously stores data about each transaction, whether is credit or debt etc.</p>
  
  <p>The dilemma that I have is, I don't know if I should create another table to store the current balance of each account or if I should populate it dynamically by subtracting the debits from the credits.</p>
  
  <p>Part of me is saying that as the entries table grows the ability to generate the balance for each account will get slower (yes premature optimization is supposedly evil), but it also seems unnecessary to add another table when I can calculate the data from existing tables.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT:</strong> Sorry I may not have been clear, I understand how to implement either method of creating the account balance. I was more looking the advantages/disadvantages of either method as well as what would be the 'best practice'. Thanks very much for the replies!</p>