Amounts are exact
Civic stores money as whole minor units — the smallest unit of your currency — never as a decimal that can drift. With two decimal places,$12.34 is stored as the integer 1234. Every calculation is done on these integers, so totals always add up exactly. A balance is only ever turned into a friendly $12.34 for display.
Accounts
Each member has two accounts:
Civic also keeps two internal accounts, which you never see directly:
- One that creates money when income is paid or a balance is increased.
- One that removes money when a balance is decreased.
The ledger
Every movement of money is recorded once, and it is designed so that it cannot be quietly changed.- Each movement creates two or more entries that sum to exactly zero — money leaves one place and arrives in another.
- Member accounts cannot go below zero. A request that would do so is refused.
- Entries are append-only. Nothing is edited in place; corrections are made with a new entry.
- Each entry records the balance after it, so history is reproducible.
No double payments
Every movement carries a reference. If the same request arrives twice — a repeated click, a retry after a network blip, a worker restarting mid-payout — Civic recognises the reference and returns the original result instead of paying again.This is why Civic can safely retry after a crash. It is also why a member will never be paid twice for the same day.