Aside from the experience, have you considered Money Manager EX?  It's a simple 
account ledger (single entry), open source, portable (it's written in Java, I 
believe).

If you want to do it on your own then my advice is to never store sums in the 
database.  They should be calculated and recalculated on the fly.  When opening 
a ledger, the program should calculate the balance of all transactions and the 
balance of all cleared transactions.  When you add or modify a transaction then 
you recalculate the running total and compare with the balance figures plus the 
change made.  The running totals and the calculated totals are kept separate 
from each other.  Use different functions to perform the calculations for an 
extra bit of reliability.

You could go with a double-entry system.  It's more complex to write and use 
but double-entry book-keeping ensures that mistakes and errors are caught 
immediately.

--Rich P.

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