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Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

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Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#21

Post by adius »

hosh wrote: post #15
marcrosoft wrote: post #6

I think throwing out the terms credit/debit is a mistake. Everyone operates on GAAP and we shouldn't deviate.

Not only that, there are some really useful properties of the double entry system: https://arxiv.org/abs/1407.1898 That's defining a group called the Pacioli Group. One thing that is relatively easy to do with this group is to quickly verify consistency in the transactions. That is something you lose with a single-entry system.

Transity isn't a single entry system. By using transactions to model financial flows it implicitly enforces that the amount is credited to the "from" account and debited to the "to" account. Therefore it's basically double entry by design.

I'm really interested if someone can show me a use case where this system is less powerful / safe than a classic double entry system.

Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#22

Post by ams6110 »

hannibalhorn wrote: post #10
sushisource wrote: post #3

No judgement, but can someone explain to me the use case for this sort of thing? I'd imagine for anything other than the simplest stuff, you're going to start using something a bit more powerful, and for the simple stuff - who with the skills and knowledge of this type of tool really needs to do small time pocketbook budgeting?

I can't speak to Transity, but I use HLedger for my entity (nothing fancy, just a single member LLC.) I can keep my ledger in git, I don't need to pay for or even learn to use QuickBooks, I can quickly write a script to import data from basically anywhere, and I can use all the standard tools in my toolbox (grep, diff, python) to visualize and work with the data. I'm sure mainstream accounting programs add value as t…

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.

Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#24

Post by cgio »

adrianratnapala wrote: post #14
stevievee wrote: post #5

"Simple - No more confusing debit / credit / asset / liability mumbo jumbo" It is just "mumbo jumbo" to you because accounting/finance is not your area of expertise.

Accounting is not my area of expertise, but I have been learning it -- in simple terms -- by doing my personal accounts. When I started, I found these distinctions confusing, but I assumed they were wise. Now I find them arbitrary and annoying, although I am less confused by them. I suspect there will be a third stage where I will learn their true value. But I also strongly expect that the value lies in them being a…

Further to the sibling reply on Pacioli groups, you might find Ellerman interesting. I copy a link [1] but he has lots of material on his website, including a book. He discusses the group perspective of double entry and gets some extensions on e.g. multidimensional accounting mostly targeted towards his interest in property theory.

[1] http://www.ellerman.org/the-math-of-double-entry-bookkeeping...

Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#25

Post by gamblor956 »

adius wrote: post #17
gamblor956 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are extremely basic financial terms. If you (meaning the generic you, not you specifically) can't understand them you really shouldn't be doing your own accounting. It would be like creating a niche programming IDE for people who don't understand the term "computer" or "programming" or "code."

And that's exactly what e.g. Zapier and Airtable Blocks do ... and quite successfully so. In specialized communities there is a lot of gatekeeping just by their slang. If I can explain something in plain english without using numerous technical terms, I've mastered the first hurdle to make it more accessible.

A cursory view of their homepages reveals a large amount of tech "lingo" that require a fair amount of computer savvy, so nothing at all like what I'm describing.

Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#26

Post by lquist »

CLI tools also have the advantage that their developers don't have to waste their time building and maintaining a useless GUI, but can instead use the time to improve the tool itself

Maybe it's just me, but I stopped reading here b/c this language struck me as unnecessarily antagonistic. Just some feedback.

Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#27

Post by adrianratnapala »

hosh wrote: post #19
adrianratnapala wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accounting is not my area of expertise, but I have been learning it -- in simple terms -- by doing my personal accounts. When I started, I found these distinctions confusing, but I assumed they were wise. Now I find them arbitrary and annoying, although I am less confused by them. I suspect there will be a third stage where I will learn their true value. But I also strongly expect that the value lies in them being a…

Some mathematicians had constructed a group (Pacioli Group) to analyze the characteristics of using such a system. One thing a double-entry system can do that a single-entry cannot is to quickly verify the consistency of the transactions. The specific names of "debit", "credit", etc. are jargon. The properties that allow for quick verification works on more complex transactions. I might use a single-entry ledger for…

This is going far beyond my own knowledge. I only use double-entry. Or at least I use a style where everything is a transaction that adds up to zero -- there can be more than two accounts in a transaction. I don't even understand single-entry.

[UPDATE: I am now pretty sure there is a serious misunderstanding my paragraph above, but think it is more constructive to note it, than to delete it.]

My main objection was to making account types so so fundamental. From the POV of my account book "Assets:InTheBank" behaves just like "Liabilities:CreditCard". True, the later balance is almost always negative, but it is the minus sign and not the word "Liabilities" that matters.

Similarly for transactions, a plus or a minus in front of a delta is less confusing to me than the equivalent accountant-jargon. But here, for some reason, I have more sympathy for accountants and their jargon.

Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#28

Post by gamblor956 »

adius wrote: post #21
hosh wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that, there are some really useful properties of the double entry system: https://arxiv.org/abs/1407.1898 That's defining a group called the Pacioli Group. One thing that is relatively easy to do with this group is to quickly verify consistency in the transactions. That is something you lose with a single-entry system.

Transity isn't a single entry system. By using transactions to model financial flows it implicitly enforces that the amount is credited to the "from" account and debited to the "to" account. Therefore it's basically double entry by design. I'm really interested if someone can show me a use case where this system is less powerful / safe than a classic double entry system.

What you've described is literally not double-entry. Double-entry is based on the concepts of two accounts being modified by a related set of similarly-sized transactions (i.e., the credit and debit actions). The idea is that you can separately replay the sets of transactions for each account and at the end they reconcile (i.e., balance) because the accounts are modified separately.

You've presented a system in which one transaction modifies 2 accounts. If there's an error in the code, you've got no way of knowing it without manually checking the calculations by hand.

Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#29

Post by toomim »

Hm, the article asserts that Ledger doesn't have tags:

> Sub accounts vs. Tags > But what if the expense is part of another category as well, like expenses for your vacation? Well, you'd be at a loss. There is no good way to model this in ledger-likes without getting really hacky.

But that's not true. Ledger has tags. You specify a tag with:

    :tagname:
For instance:

    6-5-2018 Gave food to Bart Simpson, while on vacation
        Expenses:bart     1 orange    ; :vacation:
        Assets:food

Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#30

Post by bsilvereagle »

brianjoseff wrote: post #18
hannibalhorn wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak to Transity, but I use HLedger for my entity (nothing fancy, just a single member LLC.) I can keep my ledger in git, I don't need to pay for or even learn to use QuickBooks, I can quickly write a script to import data from basically anywhere, and I can use all the standard tools in my toolbox (grep, diff, python) to visualize and work with the data. I'm sure mainstream accounting programs add value as t…

from where/how are you getting your data in?

I'm not the parent, but it's fairly straightforward to get data into the ledger format.

I have written a handful of Python scripts to convert CSV credit card statements (Chase, credit unions, etc) to ledger. Additionally, pdfquery can be used to extract data from PDF statements.

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