Accounting for Developers, Part II

It's running on NextJS which pre-loads the content of each link in the viewport unless you tell it not to, so it's loading a .json file containing the article content immediately, making the page transition instant when and if you click it.

That's a cool idea. Any other deep-dive guides on fintech/payments that would be helpful for readers here? We're always looking for new topics to write about.

That's great insight. When I was at big 4, I helped look over in house software and translate it for auditors to gain reasonable assurance that the software was correctly implementing accounting processes.

A buddy of mine is working on a YC-funded company (https://www.keeper.app/) that's designed around assisting the lives of bookkeepers using quickbooks. I think it's a great angle because I agree with you that quickbooks is the most logical option for an average company. Where software could really be improved in my eyes is SAP. Boy does their software make me want to hurl... But they have such a strong hold in the industry.

This is a bit tangential, but my biggest insight when conducting walkthroughs with the client's accountants was that there is so much valuable knowledge that is internalized in singular individuals. I'd have an accountant show me their month end close process with links between 5 Excel worksheets. Totally illogical flow and only that person understood how to follow the process from start to finish. There would be situations like randomly multiplying a line item by 32 because of some piece of paper on their desk that they had written down years ago. These people had been at the company for 20+ years. I have to think there's a better system for handling accounting processes like that. Weeding through a messy code base can be a nightmare, but going through someone else's accounting worksheets that are crucial for tying out the financial statements can be nearly impossible. I suppose eventually the audit team has to decide what's material, make a judgement call, and move on.

Here’s my approach to accounting:

    If $moneyIn > $moneyOut:
        Print(“hells yeah”)
    Else:
        Print(”oh shit”)

I would like to know about this as well. I struggled with this for a while for a prediction market app that I'm building. Eventually I ended up with [1]. I am somewhat pleased with it, but it does feel unwieldy to work with. I have some vague hope that somebody who actually implemented banking software would know of an obvious and elegant schema.

The summary of my approach is:

* A table with accounts. * A table with account balances and an index on (account id, id), so you can efficiently query the current balance. * A table with transactions. * A table with mutations. Mutations have an amount, and reference a credit account, debit account, and transaction. (So one transaction can consist of multiple mutations.) * The account balances table list the post-balance, but also references the mutation that caused it to be that new value.

All of these tables are append-only. I later added another layer, with transactions and subtransactions, but I'm not sure if this was a good idea.

[1]: https://github.com/ruuda/hanson/blob/351e8e9bc5c96a9c1dc76fd...