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Godley tables describes sets of financial flows from the point of view of a particular economic agent, such as a bank. The columns of the table represent accounts (possibly aggregated), which are treated as integration variables by the system. Accounts may be assets, liabilities or equities. Assets may appear as liabilities in another agent's Godley table, and vice versa, with the sense of the financial flows treated oppositely (a credit flow increasing the asset of one entity will appear as a debit flow, increasing the value of a liability). Transfers between accounts should satisfy the accounting equation (Assets-Liabilities-Equities = 0). So if the transfer is between an asset and a liability, then it should appear with the same sign (both positive or both negative), otherwise between two accounts of the same type, or between a liability and an equity, the terms should have opposite signs.
Instead of signed flows, one can optionally use CR and DR prefixes, as specified in the options panel. Each row of the table should have have one CR entry, and one DR entry. The row sum column should be zero if it is done correctly.
The first row specifies the stock variables, after which follow the flow rows. Usually, the row marked “Initial Conditions” comes next, but may be placed in any position. These specify the initial conditions of the stock variables, and may refer to a multiple of another variable, just like the initial condition field, or just be a numerical value.
Finally come the flows. The first column is a simple textual label (the phrase “Initial Conditions”, regardless of capitalisation, is a reserved phrase for setting stock variable initial conditions) identifying the flow. The flows themselves are written as a numerical multiplier times a flow variable. For example, if you wanted to transfer an amount between the asset and liability column, you might write “Amount" in both columns, which would satisfy the equation A-L-E=0. It would also be possible to write “2Amount" in the asset column, along with “Amount" in both the Liability and Equity columns. This would still satisfy A-L-E=0.
The Godley table also shows the value of the entered variable, displayed within the table. For example, if you set “Amount" to equal the value of system time, on opening the Godley table, wherever you entered “Amount" in the table the cell would show “Amount = 0.00" if the system time was set to 0.00. This provides a helpful tool for displaying the value of the variable at that point in the simulation. This feature can be enabled or disabled in the preferences panel.