Posting debits and credits in ARM

Hello All and Vish

I am new to Acumatica and have just realised after trying to write a basic ARM report that Acumatica basically hold the accounting data in the equivalent of an old fashioned T account. So everything is held as debits and credits but the value of the field is positive. This makes creating reports and moving data much more difficult than the convention that I am used as an accountant of the data actually being held as a negative or a positive with no need to refer to the General Ledger Type to work out it’s actual value. I am thinking that maybe this is unusual it’s certainly a change for me as I have never had to work with data in this format before. Is it an American convention? 

Is it something that could be considered that the debit and credit entries take on their real value i.e. a credit to sales is a minus etc. 

Also the standard reports have lots of hard coded sub totals and this again is a bit old school, I think people these days prefer to have to raw data rather than somebody else’s idea of what you want, this data then can’t be downloaded for manipulation, who needs subtotals and totals these days?

This is a bit of a rant but seeing in the community the mention of the financials being difficult to get out of the system I justed wanted to add my frustrations to the list. Maybe someone can point out the positives in this data structure so I can see them and feel better? 

Best Regards and al the best