Most business applications eventually need to track more than documents.
A purchase document is not only a form.
A sales document is not only a row in a table.
A business action can change operational state:
- inventory available;
- quantity consumed;
- customer balance;
- resource usage;
- allocation;
- operational progress;
- reportable state.
That is where Operational Registers come in.
What are Operational Registers?
In NGB Platform, Operational Registers are used to track durable operational business state.
They are not accounting entries.
They are not just audit logs.
They answer a different question:
What changed in the business operation?
For example:
- how many units are available?
- how much quantity was consumed?
- what balance changed?
- which resource was allocated?
- what state should be available for reports or future business actions?
Operational Registers are about operational truth.
Why not store this directly on the document?
A document stores business intent and context.
For example, a purchase document can say:
We received these items into this warehouse.
A sales document can say:
We sold these items to this customer.
But operational state should not be hidden only inside mutable document rows.
If inventory availability, balances, usage, or progress are stored only as fields on documents, the system becomes harder to explain and harder to report on.
Instead, a posted document action can create durable Operational Register movements.
That gives the system a separate, reportable history of what changed.
Example: purchase and sale
In the Trade vertical, a purchase document can increase inventory.
A sales document can decrease inventory.
The documents represent the business events.
The Operational Register rows record the operational effects.
A simplified example:
Purchase Invoice → +10 units
Sales Invoice → -3 units
Available stock → 7 units
The important part is not just the final number.
The important part is that the number can be explained through durable movements.
Operational Registers are not Accounting
Operational Registers are separate from Accounting.
Accounting tracks financial ledger effects.
Operational Registers track operational movements and balances.
A sale may create accounting entries, but it may also change inventory, quantities, allocations, usage, or other operational state.
Those are different concerns.
Putting every business effect into accounting would be wrong.
Not every business document is financial.
And not every business effect belongs in accounting.
Operational Registers are not Audit Logs
Operational Registers are also separate from audit history.
Audit history answers questions like:
- who did something?
- when did they do it?
- what action was executed?
Operational Registers answer questions like:
- what quantity changed?
- what balance changed?
- what operational state is now available?
- what can reports and future actions rely on?
Both are useful, but they solve different problems.
OR, RR, and Accounting are peer capabilities
In NGB Platform, Operational Registers, Reference Registers, and Accounting are peer platform capabilities.
Operational Registers track operational movements and balances.
Reference Registers track effective reference state over time.
Accounting tracks financial ledger effects.
A document action can create:
- Operational Register movements;
- Reference Register changes;
- Accounting entries;
- any combination of them;
- or none of them.
That flexibility matters because different vertical business applications need different kinds of durable business state.
Why Operational Registers matter
Operational Registers make business software easier to reason about.
They make operational state:
- durable;
- reportable;
- explainable;
- reusable by future actions;
- separate from accounting;
- separate from audit history.
This is especially important in document-driven applications where business actions create consequences that should outlive the document form itself.
The core idea
The core idea is simple:
Documents describe business intent.
Actions create durable business history.
Operational Registers record operational movements and balances.
That gives NGB Platform a reusable way to model operational truth across different vertical business applications.
Links
Video: https://youtu.be/Ra54WlrXSJU
GitHub: https://github.com/ngbplatform/NGB
Website: https://ngbplatform.com
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