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Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

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Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#111

Post by maxerickson »

gglitch wrote: post #110
maxerickson wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd have 5 main accounts there. Income:Job Asset:Bank1 Asset:Bank2 Expenses:whatever Liabilities:whatever And then each transaction moves the money from one account to another. Income->Asset, Asset->Expenses, etc. Value moves into the system from income, Expenses are (more or less) transactions where value moves out of the accounting system. You track your salary but probably not the hours you work and that you spe…

Thanks for this outline. I've been a happy user of Ledger for several months now, but have been stymied about how to model a scenario in which several family members pay me in advance for a bill we collectively owe that's payable in the future, and in which their payments end up in my checking account. I now see that I should have set up the future sum payment as a local, temporary liability, each family member's dep…

You could use virtual accounts for that, posting the received funds to your checking account and also to a virtual account that you eventually balance with the purchase (which would also have both real and virtual postings).

Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#112

Post by tarsinge »

adius wrote: post #73
madhadron wrote: post #49

There are several things wrong here: 1. The author doesn't understand bookkeeping. 2. The author doesn't somehow believes that emulated teletypes are a good substrate for building user interfaces. 3. The author has spent significant time writing a bookkeeping tool for his business instead of doing something that will move the business forward. If you're thinking about writing an open source accounting program, spend…

1. Feel free to back up your claim, otherwise I'm not sure how you come to that conclusion 2. It has a user interface … just not graphical 3. Well, I guess we just have different opinions on where forward is 4. I've been working with GnuCash, Ledger and Hledger and I've written several scripts to extend them (e.g. to support timestamps and not just dates, which shouldn't be asked too much for an accounting tool ), bu…

> No more confusing debit / credit / asset / liability mumbo jumbo

How is separating what you have (assets/liabilities) from your revenues/expenses confusing? It's basic tools to get a view of the profitability vs the Balance sheet (what the company owns) vs the cash flow.

The idea of looking at it in terms of transaction is interesting, I recommend looking at https://martin.kleppmann.com/2011/03/07/accounting-for-compu... for a good take on this idea.

Edit: typo

Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#113

Post by Jtsummers »

gglitch wrote: post #110
maxerickson wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd have 5 main accounts there. Income:Job Asset:Bank1 Asset:Bank2 Expenses:whatever Liabilities:whatever And then each transaction moves the money from one account to another. Income->Asset, Asset->Expenses, etc. Value moves into the system from income, Expenses are (more or less) transactions where value moves out of the accounting system. You track your salary but probably not the hours you work and that you spe…

Thanks for this outline. I've been a happy user of Ledger for several months now, but have been stymied about how to model a scenario in which several family members pay me in advance for a bill we collectively owe that's payable in the future, and in which their payments end up in my checking account. I now see that I should have set up the future sum payment as a local, temporary liability, each family member's dep…

I'd want to keep my checking account in ledger and real world matching. So either use a virtual account to indicate that some money, while existing in checking, is actually allocated to something else (this is a budget, basically). You can also create asset accounts for what people owe you. Once they pay you you move it from what they owe you to your checking account. For this one, you might have a couple transactions like:

  2018/06/01 Roommate owes me
      Assets:Accounts Receivable       100.00 USD
      Income:Roommate
  2018/06/06 Roommate paid me
      Assets:Checking                  100.00 USD
      Assets:Accounts Receivable
You can drill down another level to add who owes you the money, or perhaps tag it.

The end result is that your checking account is always accurate. Then, as maxerickson says, use virtual accounts to handle mark where the needs to go next or what it's intended for. Also examine ledger's budgeting capabilities for this.

https://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html#Effective-Da...

Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#114

Post by tome »

rjzzleep wrote: post #72
mjrbrennan wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found a lot of people seem to hate it. I like using it in the command line personally, I find that 99% of the time I am using the same commands day in day out so I don't have to do anything particularly hard using the git CLI.

my absolute favorite command is: git add -p {insert some path here}. personally, I don't know why people claim that mercurial is so much more intuitive, but I also don't think that something that is clearly a personal preference based on previous experience warrants an ideologic war.

If you like that just wait until you've tried

    git -c interactive.singleKey=true commit --verbose --patch

Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#115

Post by gglitch »

_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #41
ams6110 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used ledger to keep the books as treasurer for a small non-profit for a few years. It worked really well for me but the problem came with handing it off to the next person or thinking about involving an accountant to do the annual reports. Very few are going to be able to deal with a text file of journal entries. QuickBooks is the standard for all small business accounting, like it or not.

I've never actually used it (or Quickbooks), but does ledger have any way of exporting something that could imported by Quickbooks? > Very few are going to be able to deal with a text file of journal entries. QuickBooks is the standard for all small business accounting, like it or not. I always find this lowest-common-denominator as de facto standard depressing. It's how we end up with word processing documents as a…

I have recently learned a technical term for the scenario you're describing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium

"Informally, a strategy profile is a Nash equilibrium if no player can do better by unilaterally changing his or her strategy. To see what this means, imagine that each player is told the strategies of the others. Suppose then that each player asks themselves: 'Knowing the strategies of the other players, and treating the strategies of the other players as set in stone, can I benefit by changing my strategy?'

If any player could answer "Yes", then that set of strategies is not a Nash equilibrium. But if every player prefers not to switch (or is indifferent between switching and not) then the strategy profile is a Nash equilibrium. Thus, each strategy in a Nash equilibrium is a best response to all other strategies in that equilibrium.

The Nash equilibrium may sometimes appear non-rational in a third-person perspective. This is because a Nash equilibrium is not necessarily Pareto optimal."

Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#116

Post by seanc »

chris_wot wrote: post #48
mikeyjk wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it is fair to say that git users loathe it overall. I enjoy using git, is this not a common experience?

Yup, it's much easier in many ways to use the git CLI than it is to use a UI.

emacs magit is the exception that proves your rule.

Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#117

Post by gglitch »

maxerickson wrote: post #111
gglitch wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for this outline. I've been a happy user of Ledger for several months now, but have been stymied about how to model a scenario in which several family members pay me in advance for a bill we collectively owe that's payable in the future, and in which their payments end up in my checking account. I now see that I should have set up the future sum payment as a local, temporary liability, each family member's dep…

You could use virtual accounts for that, posting the received funds to your checking account and also to a virtual account that you eventually balance with the purchase (which would also have both real and virtual postings).

Thanks. I've had a hard time understanding the documentation on virtual accounts, but I'll have another look at it.

Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#118

Post by gglitch »

Jtsummers wrote: post #113
gglitch wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for this outline. I've been a happy user of Ledger for several months now, but have been stymied about how to model a scenario in which several family members pay me in advance for a bill we collectively owe that's payable in the future, and in which their payments end up in my checking account. I now see that I should have set up the future sum payment as a local, temporary liability, each family member's dep…

I'd want to keep my checking account in ledger and real world matching. So either use a virtual account to indicate that some money, while existing in checking, is actually allocated to something else (this is a budget, basically). You can also create asset accounts for what people owe you. Once they pay you you move it from what they owe you to your checking account. For this one, you might have a couple transaction…

Thanks for the detailed recommendations! I've read the documentation on virtual accounts but haven't wrapped my mind around them yet. I'll have another go at it.

Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#119

Post by krupan »

billfruit wrote: post #55

After trying to use GNU cash for some time, I got the feeling that a personal accounting app needs to be a web based service, to enable it to be used while on the move/travelling, because I found myself building up a huge backlog of entries to be made in to the system in these situations. After about a month of use, I gave up, since the overhead of jotting down transactions and later entering into the system. I doubt…

This exists now:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.gnucash.an...

Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#120

Post by captainmuon »

Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #109
captainmuon wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if it is implemented in this tool, but there is no reason that you could not have multiple "to" fields in a transaction. In double bookkeeping, you must have balanced books, but you do not note which bookings occur together. The transactional scheme seems strictly superior because you automatically know which debits and credits or losses and gains go together. You automatically have balanced books. I thi…

The data model is somewhat secondary to the accounting model, however the data model has to be rich enough to support the accounting model. In the traditional accounting model you have two major things: 1. The Ledger, which is the current state of your accounts. Generally each account is a page (or more) in the ledger which lists the debits and credits for that account. 2. The Journal Entries, which are the source do…

Thanks for your very clear answer!

My point was basically, most or all of the interesting information is stored in the journal. You could hide the legder from a non-technical user, or even generate it on-the-fly. I think this is the distinguishing idea in OP's program. That the data model has only one "from" and one "to" field is incidential and could be fixed.

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