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None the less, the result has been some software which seems to have worked well for those that have used it. I certainly haven't received any angry issues.
I'll link to this thread from that page.
Note to people looking for job security: there is a HUGE need for developers who understand finance. The fundamental problem is that most finance people can't speak the language of software development (the biggest problem I've seen is that finance people tend to be very poor at writing out a spec of what the software should do - they're much better at looking at a set of examples and then telling you if the calculat…
I used ledger [1] to track all of my expenses for roughly four years. It's a command line based double entry accounting tool. It was super interesting in terms of figuring out where money went and general double entry accounting techniques. That said, it was a ton of work to keep up to date given that I was trying to track money when I spent it vs when it cleared my bank account, and those two often varied by several…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always felt that equation was confusing. Because then the sign has to be taught separately, or numbers have to have two columns (credit and debit) and you need to understand where each one is. assets + liabilities + equity = 0 Seemed much more general. Double entry just became: everything (transactions, whole companies) sum to zero. Then just one other little thing (where money comes from in a transaction is positi…
Think of it this way: Assets - Liabilities = Equity If we deduct everything that we owe (Liabilities) from everything that we own (Assets), whatever is left belongs to the shareholders (Equity).
Or you can use negative numbers and everything just works.
Your financial software _will_ use my approach. As do the most sophisticated software of the most complicated companies. But their presentation gets mangled through a complicated series of rules for archaic reasons.
One of the best developer-oriented explanations of accounting I've read is "Accounting for Computer Scientists" by Martin Kleppmann.[0] He explains double-entry accounting visually in terms of graph theory. Even though I'm not very good at graph theory, I found the diagrams and explanations extremely intuitive. [0] https://martin.kleppmann.com/2011/03/07/accounting-for-compu...
And sometimes when change happened I didn't want to loose that info so I used addition instead and put it in a "special" column.
If you agree with that assessment, it's interesting to think of blockchain as "triple entry accounting".
From the site: "I found the core explanation of double entry accounting to be confusing. After some time I distilled it down to the following: "Debits decrease the value of an account. Always. [1] Credits increase the value of an account. Always. [1] "[1] (1, 2) This is absolutely not what accountancy teaches. You’ll quickly see that there is a lot of wrangling over what account types get increased/decreased with a d…
The easy way to remember this is just to think that the right hand side is what you think it should be, and the left hand side isn't.
Double entry book keeping is under appreciated - it's one of the earliest examples of error correction and detection coding kicking around.
I learned double entry accounting. "Debits decrease and credits increase" is just one way to represent the numbers; I have also seen the other way around (where debits are positive). But more commonly, the presentation is such that debits increase the accounts on the left, and credits increase the accounts on the right. (Nevertheless, the explanation there does work.) Some time ago (while I was bored in the accountin…
https://plaintextaccounting.org/ is a site listing all of these text based accounting tools out there.