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Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

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Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#71

Post by deltux »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #62
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.

Somebody should write a proper "accounting for regular people" guide, because I too find those terms confusing - and also completely separated for any experience ever that I had with money. And it only gets worse from there, with "accounts receivable" and "accounts payable". Is that an American thing? I try not to fall into the trap of being proud of my own ignorance; but after many hours of reading introductory acco…

I found that this tutorial [1] was really helpful to help me understand how it works, in layman's terms. I followed it with hledger [2], but it should work with any double-entry bookkeeping system. You can also find a lot of resources here [3].

[1] http://www.dwmbeancounter.com/tutorial/Tutorial.html

[2] http://hledger.org/

[3] http://plaintextaccounting.org/

Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#72

Post by rjzzleep »

mjrbrennan wrote: post #61
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?

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.

Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#73

Post by adius »

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 ), but it was always a nasty hack and so I wrote my own. Just like you said.

Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#74

Post by mbrock »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #62
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.

Somebody should write a proper "accounting for regular people" guide, because I too find those terms confusing - and also completely separated for any experience ever that I had with money. And it only gets worse from there, with "accounts receivable" and "accounts payable". Is that an American thing? I try not to fall into the trap of being proud of my own ignorance; but after many hours of reading introductory acco…

Consider watching this little series on Khan Academy and then sketching out your start of year balance sheet and a month's income statement.

https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/core-fi...

This might clarify the account types (assets, liabilities, equity, income, and expense) as structuring the income/balance reports, and accrual basis accounting as the reason to have "accounts payable/receivable."

Consider also thinking of your accounts as nodes in a directed graph. When you credit account 1 and debit account 2, you draw an edge from 1 to 2, representing a transaction. The credit is the "source" and the debit the "target."

(Double entry means you record a transaction as two updates with opposite charge, so credits and debits are listed separately. This is basically an error-correcting heuristic from 15th century Italy, which is still a good practice.)

So when you send an invoice to a client, that's a transaction. You obtain an asset taken from another entity. So you credit a revenue account and debit an asset account called "accounts receivable" (it's not "cash"). When you receive the payment, you credit accounts receivable and debit cash.

Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#75

Post by joyinsky »

Basically the problem here is that the author didn't care even a little to understand why accounting is done with a double entry system.

Basically what he was trying to do here was a expense and income administrator with tags. That it's just a part of what bookkeeping and accounting is.

Nice try. But you can't replace what works and what has been done for reliability and confidence since 1400 at least by the masters of trade.

Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#76

Post by eXpl0it3r »

csomar wrote: post #64

I'm not sure why the OP is getting s%%t from the community. He built a simple application, probably out of love of software development. It is not complete or perfect. It is also probably not the best use of his business time. But we do waste time on other stuff too. This CLI app could be useful to me for a subset of accounting I do. Yes, it won't be able to track VAT accounts. It won't amortize my expenses. But if I…

You can't expect to just get happy feedback, especially from a rather critical thinking community such as HN and when you then write dismissively about stuff, you shouldn't be surprised when it's held against you.

> 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.

It's fine if you like CLI apps and find it painful maintaining a GUI application, but it's not helpful to write it as a general statement. CLI "GUI" tools also require quite a bit of work and I'd claim that an experienced GUI developer will spend less time on creating a GUI app, than the author had spent to get their CLI "GUI" app display as wanted.

> It made sense in former times as this layout makes it easier to add up the amounts by hand, but not in times of computers.

Double booking keeping isn't just a relic from the past. There are big benefits to it and just because it doesn't fit into simple account keeping, doesn't mean we can just pretend that it's useless, because computers!

In summary you simply should not write your opinions as if they were facts. You can do so if you want, but then you need to be prepared to get some critical feedback.

Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#77

Post by ransom1538 »

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…

Hey madhadron, you sound like you understand bookkeeping. So I have a quick question. After using Mint (from Intuit) I have everything balanced & tagged and 99% automated. I have reports, ways to export, daily/monthly/yearly totals, breakdowns by types, handle liabilities & debts, i can project net, see assets over time, etc etc. Why wouldn't a business just use mint? After watching vidoes on GnuCash like you recommend - it is like watching someone make Mint by hand. When people out there get a check (income), do they open GnuCash and start typing stuff? Really?? Mint on the otherhand, detects the income by scanning all accounts, automatically categorizes it, etc etc.

GnuCash - I could see mistakes everywhere. I don't see how this is much different than what an accountant would do in 1740 england. Why not have it all automated -- with computers??

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqAaScYVeRQ

Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#78

Post by xorcist »

madhadron wrote: post #54
grimgrin wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is likely an insult to git but it’s really similar to vim in that regard. After using ST2 or TextMate for so long, many people aren’t interested in learning (remembering?) how to use vim’s modals/commands. A lot of people probably did start with SourceTree or a git plug-in in Visual Studio etc My git workflow is very much tied to aliases. Customization is a hot thing for many people (but really you should probab…

I go the other way. After twenty years of unix, the first few without X11, I have become very clear on what is cruft and history and what is actually making my life better. SourceTree didn't exist when I started using git, but it makes the day to day operations of source control much easier and more precise than the command line. I spent enough years in a command line debugger that I am thrilled to have good debugger…

> It's easy to get into a machismo thing where you regard the shell

Unspoken presumptions about how the CLI is harder to use and GUIs somehow more natural (because graphics) is usually a sign of not understanding neither.

I spend most of my time in my editor and at the command line because it's easier to use. I don't have to learn thousands of little clickable widgets just to get the job done (which tend to change with every version of the tool).

That said, there are good and bad user interfaces with CLI tools, just like with GUI tools.

What's more interesting however, is how tools shape the way you think. CLI tools tend to feel like processing data, whereas with GUI tools you feel like maneouvering a large machine. The former tends to lead to fewer mistakes at scale.

Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#79

Post by Bromskloss »

eXpl0it3r wrote: post #76
csomar wrote: post #64

I'm not sure why the OP is getting s%%t from the community. He built a simple application, probably out of love of software development. It is not complete or perfect. It is also probably not the best use of his business time. But we do waste time on other stuff too. This CLI app could be useful to me for a subset of accounting I do. Yes, it won't be able to track VAT accounts. It won't amortize my expenses. But if I…

You can't expect to just get happy feedback, especially from a rather critical thinking community such as HN and when you then write dismissively about stuff, you shouldn't be surprised when it's held against you. > 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. It's fine if you lik…

What are the benefits of double-entry bookkeeping?

Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#80

Post by Bromskloss »

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.

About that, isn't the difference between "debit" and "credit", and between "asset" and "liability", just a minus sign?
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