A series of posts about those things. Oldest posts first.

Two basic patterns of Valueflows, and how they fit together

  1. Resources, Events, and Agents (REA)
  2. Input-Process-Output Resource Flows (IPO)

In general, how they fit together: Agents perform Economic Events that provide Inputs to Processes and take Outputs from Processes and move Resources from one Process to another.

Here is a true story about the resource flows in a garden class that will be held this year in at least one and maybe more than one US university:

garden flows

Here are a lot more details about that garden class. You might want to open this diagram in a different tab and enlarge it to make it more readable.

garden class details

The students in that class will provide work to prepare and plant a garden plot and then harvest the food, and the food from the garden will go to the school cafeteria. The students will earn credits from their work, which can be exchanged for meals in the cafeteria.

So we have inflows of work and seeds going into a garden plot, and outflows of food and credits. The food becomes inflows to the cafeteria, which becomes outflows of meals for the students, and credits become inflows to the students which they exchange with the cafeteria for the meals.