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RSSEx Accountant Spreading the Love
A couple of quick accounting tricks that I learned while doing multi-class mutual fund accounting with nothing more advanced than a pencil and a big-ass eraser. I don’t know why they came to mind today, but they did, so I spread the love.
1. If the sum of the digits of a number are evenly divisible by 3, then the number itself is divisible by 3. For example, 2235 (2+2+3+5=12) is divisible by three, while 2235525 (2+2+3+5+5+3+5=25) is not. This might be useful when pretending to be Rain Man or when dividing up a large number of M&Ms.
2. If you are actually one of those humans that balances their checkbook by hand, it is useful to know that transposing two numbers (writing 132 instead of 123) is easy to spot with a simple trick: Take the number that you were supposed to end up with and subtract the number that you actually ended up with. Then take all the digits of the result and add them up. If it is evenly divisible by 9, then it is very likely that you transposed 2 numbers when doing your math. Or you can simply follow the old accounting method of forgoing the math, over and shorting the difference, and spending your time on more useful pursuits.
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