Accounting for Uncertainty

As an assurance for uncertain developments, accounting should handle uncertainty with reserves. This is not any different from financial accounting.

The rules of accounting used here are strict and demand that no budget is ever exhausted to drop below zero. Since publication of open data will be sitting around for a while before their next version, it is necessary to avoid negative balances in the mean time.

The rule now is that statistics must be used to have 95% assurance that no balance is overdrawn from the current publication to the next. There is no limitation on how often this open data is published, so in case of a problem it can be immediately corrected, but there will also be some processing time in children or peers and for that reason there may be a need for leniency. The uncertainty margin is there to accommodate such situations.

If used, the "margin" key can be added to any party object, or to the overall object, to index a values array with any budget with the sole purpose of avoiding overdrawing the carbon budget.