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Accounting for Developers, Part II

moderntreasury.com

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Re: Accounting for Developers, Part II

#11

Post by eatonphil »

keeptrying wrote: post #2

Love the simplicity of their system but don't like the price tag. Anyone know of cheaper alternatives to ModernTreasury.com ? Funtionality needed: ledger + integration with payments.

TigerBeetle is an open source ledger database you might be interested in.

Not sure about payments integration though.

https://github.com/coilhq/tigerbeetle

Re: Accounting for Developers, Part II

#13

Post by mamcx »

pwpw wrote: post #3

As a CPA and software developer, I've been wondering if I should build my own product out, but there seems to be a number of options available in the ledger space. However, I'm surprised there isn't more of an overlap in software engineering and accounting. There's a bit of overlap in the fields that scratch the same itch. Although the theory behind accounting is a lot more interesting than most of the work in my exp…

Making a ledger is step 0 at building ERP-like apps so many of us don't see it as big deal (until the complexities of it arise!).

Also it could be very local-dependent.

Here in Colombia how we approach it is different to how I see people in USA do it.

What I don't know is how make it both easy, universal, practical and pluggable.

If for example is a out-of-band solution (aka: a micro-service) will be a total NO for many of potential users..

Re: Accounting for Developers, Part II

#14

Post by travisG23 »

pwpw wrote: post #3

As a CPA and software developer, I've been wondering if I should build my own product out, but there seems to be a number of options available in the ledger space. However, I'm surprised there isn't more of an overlap in software engineering and accounting. There's a bit of overlap in the fields that scratch the same itch. Although the theory behind accounting is a lot more interesting than most of the work in my exp…

Hey I'm co-founder of Proper Finance https://www.properfinance.io we're building integrated ledgering and reconciliation software for fintech companies. Happy to be helpful where we can - most of the team were early engineers at Marqeta where we worked on the core ledger, as well as reconciliation and financial controls - so happy to provide perspective. shoot me a note - travis@properfinance.io

Re: Accounting for Developers, Part II

#16

Post by meekaaku »

perlgeek wrote: post #12

Does anybody know a good SQL / DDL schema for a double entry accounting system?

The heart of double entry accounting is extremely simple. Forget about asset/liability/expense. Money always flows from one account to another. What goes out from account_1 must go into another account(s). Typical tables:

accounts (id, name)

transaction (id, date) /* some call it journal */

transaction_line (id, transaction_id[fk], account_id[fk], amount)

I use -ve amount for credit, +ve for debit. That way when you do SUM(trascation_line.amount) it would come to 0.

This also cleanly maps to database transaction too where all transaction_line rows and transaction row should be atomic.

If you want multi-currency support, instead of amount column, it needs to be currency_code, currency_rate, amount_in_currency, amount_in_basecurrency ( i know we don't need this all, but sometimes you want to record the amount as entered, eg EURO 52.10 u want to record as entered even if your base currency is USD)

Re: Accounting for Developers, Part II

#17

Post by travisG23 »

keeptrying wrote: post #2

Love the simplicity of their system but don't like the price tag. Anyone know of cheaper alternatives to ModernTreasury.com ? Funtionality needed: ledger + integration with payments.

Mentioned this above but I'm a co-founder of Proper Finance https://www.properfinance.io where are building integrated ledgering and reconciliation software for fintech companies. We are happy to help where we can - the team were early engineers at Marqeta where we built the ledger, as well as reconciliation and financial controls. Shoot me a note - travis@properfinance.io

Re: Accounting for Developers, Part II

#18

Post by Naga »

pwpw wrote: post #3

As a CPA and software developer, I've been wondering if I should build my own product out, but there seems to be a number of options available in the ledger space. However, I'm surprised there isn't more of an overlap in software engineering and accounting. There's a bit of overlap in the fields that scratch the same itch. Although the theory behind accounting is a lot more interesting than most of the work in my exp…

I'm also a CPA and develop software now (there are dozens of us!). I think part of this is that the perception among devs is that accounting is too complicated, and therefore can be radically simplified in software, which can be true, but largely doesn't meet real world scenarios. The problem is that accounting is generally complicated because business is complicated. I've seen software that throws away the ability to add more than 2 line items to a transaction. I've also seen software that goes too far the other way and automates every step of a process (okay great, how can we show the auditors now that this works?). It's a pretty classic misunderstanding of the domain, where most CPAs don't speak software, so there's a severe lack of communication (which probably makes CPAs who do understand software very valuable!).

The other factor is that while accounting software as a whole sucks, but at least for larger businesses, its probably better to tell the auditors that you use quickbooks, versus some custom in house software. From a risk management perspective, that's a much easier value proposition for the board/management.

Re: Accounting for Developers, Part II

#19

Post by gen220 »

perlgeek wrote: post #12

Does anybody know a good SQL / DDL schema for a double entry accounting system?

The experimental directory of `beancount` has some code for converting beancount data structures into SQL structures [1].

You could also take a look at the data structures used by GNU Ledger (e.g. account [2]) and transcribe them to SQL. A bit more work, but probably educational.

[1]: https://github.com/beancount/beancount/blob/1f180e7176808139...

[2]: https://github.com/ledger/ledger/blob/master/src/account.h

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