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Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

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Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#81

Post by bokstavkjeks »

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'll try to cover the accounts payable/receivable parts at least. One of the major points of modern bookkeeping is accrual accounting, which means that we recognize economic transactions independently of the cash transaction. Since the economic transaction occurs before the cash transaction, we can't increase the cash balance so we use a short term receivables account. I realize that this explanation isn't great, so I'll try to provide an example.

Consider that you sell a product worth $1000 on the first of January and you issue an invoice to your customer that is due 30 days later (net 30 days). As of January first the economic transaction has taken place and needs to be recorded to stay consistent with the principles of accrual accounting. As we've provided the customer with a product but haven't received payment yet, we've in reality given the customer a short-term loan of $1000 which has to be recorded. Accounts payable is the overview of all of these "short-term loans" given to our customers. The ledger entry for this transaction would increase revenue and also increase this short term loan as shown below.

January 1:

c: revenue $1000 (income statement)

d: accounts receivable $1000 (balance sheet)

Whenever the customer pays for the product we have to update our balance to reflect that the loan has been paid and that the customer no longer has any outstanding debt to us. To do this we credit (decrease) accounts receivable by $1000 and debit (increase) cash on hand by $1000. Note that the second entry doesn't touch the income statement as the revenue has already been recognized.

January 30:

c: accounts receivable $1000

d: cash $1000

The final balance of our accounts at the end of the 30 day period will be:

revenues: $1000 (credit)

accounts receivable: 0

cash: $1000 (debit)

Accounts payable is the same thing, but in reverse. When purchasing from a supplier on netX terms, we've been given a short-term, interest free, loan which we have to record until we pay it. I hope this helps.

Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#82

Post by bokstavkjeks »

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…

I can only answer 1 from the perspective of a non-US, very junior, auditor with little experience, but I'll try.

I don't see how it handles complex transactions very well. A simple example would be VAT. Assume a 25% VAT (which is standard here). If you sell a product for $1000 cash in hand the relevant transaction would be:

C: Revenues $800

C: VAT payable $200

D: Cash $1000

An even better example would be payroll which can involve 5-15 different ledger accounts for a single employee.

The next bit can probably be solved through the notes part, but how would you attach invoices and documentation with Transity?

How do you do accounts payable or receivable with it? In addition to the balance sheet sum, the accounts pay/rec should also show the balance for each individual customer and supplier.

Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#83

Post by eXpl0it3r »

Bromskloss wrote: post #79
eXpl0it3r wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm no expert in this area, but I do know accountants, Google can direct you to posts like this Quora thread [1] and while people usually don't accept this as a valid argument, a method that is to this day still widely used from small to huge businesses, seems IMHO to require more than just a "It made sense [...] but not in times of computers"-statement.

Also on the whole topic of running a business, you're honestly better off just hiring an accountant to do the work for you, so you can really spend time on your core business.

[1] https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-merits-of-double-entry-sy...

Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#84

Post by hjek »

ransom1538 wrote: post #77
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 recomme…

Intuit has a history of squeezing their users:

https://web.archive.org/web/20080321021644/http://www.infowo...

https://www.cnet.com/news/intuit-products-phone-home-more-of...

Also, your company's accounting information can be sensitive, and hence you may not want to share that information with Intuit (and whoever they choose to share/sell it to).

> Mint on the otherhand, detects the income by scanning all accounts, automatically categorizes it, etc etc.

Does this mean that you literally hand over your online account log in details to Intuit? Or how is this "scanning" done?

> 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??

What kind of mistakes were you noticing? (in the Youtube video below, I assume?)

Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#85

Post by erikb »

ransom1538 wrote: post #77
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 recomme…

The way this is formulated it looks like an automated response from an advertisement bot.

Also you know that Mint is a proprietary company which keeps and uses your data as it pleases, right? That's a huge difference to any open source tool which allows you to keep your company's data inside your company. If it uses a good file format you can also automate everything if desired.

Second, Mint sadly is not supported in many countries. If you are in the US, fine. But if you are not, e.g. your corp has a shop in Germany, then you simply can't use it at all.

I think the basic idea though is the difference between the "pay someone else to solve your problems" vs "solve problems yourself" approaches/mindsets. Each of them has their clear advantages and disadvantages and I hope we don't have to reiterate them here.

Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#86

Post by erikb »

yegle wrote: post #35

Also worth check out http://plaintextaccounting.org/ Personally I don't like the yaml-like syntax. I use beancount myself, and with fava ( https://github.com/beancount/fava ) as the UI.

This is what I was always looking for. Also loving the approach of having the UI separated.

I also don't like the yaml format for the simple reason that not all necessary information is in one line. No idea why a transaction can't be written into one line.

Also for people who love plain text, one can checkout the banking format (comes from German banks, so most info is only available in German but here's a summary): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FinTS

Gnucash should also support it, but with my bank it always fails. It's certainly not a format I would use for local storage, but it's a good source of structure and edge cases when one thinks about developing or modifying an existing format.

Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#87

Post by erikb »

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?

Probably an interesting read for you: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1e4Vz3wZB_8-ZcAwIFde8X5Cj...

Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#88

Post by Hello71 »

everyone is complaining about the accounting here, but I just want to say that 100 FONT WEIGHT AT #666 ON WHITE IS NOT AN ACCEPTABLE CONTRAST RATIO FOR BODY TEXT, especially if you do not provide your own font. even on a 1920x1080 IPS display with 1.1x scaling, using my preferred font, Noto Sans, font-weight 100 is extremely difficult to read for long stretches. DejaVu Sans's 100 is slightly thicker, but is still not acceptable for body text at that color.

Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#89

Post by csomar »

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…

The OP is emotional/opinionated, doesn't mean we should follow suit.

Regardless of his tone, he built a small CLI tool to do basic bookkeeping that can simplify double-entry bookkeeping with transaction actions/tags.

Take it or leave it. But heavily "attacking" him is a useless practice. Maybe if you don't like it just don't upvote it and move on with your life. This toxicity is not doing good for the community here.

Re: Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

#90

Post by Uplink »

THANK YOU!

I had the ideas used in this project in my head, but I've been putting off the work forever now.

I LOVE YOU FOREVER for using transactions as the central operation rather than double entry accounting, and I love you even more for adding the ability to tag transactions. I can not put off work for a web interface instead, which is a lot less work to put off :)

I haven't tried it yet, but it's now high on my list for when I get home from work.

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