[sly010]

Plaintext accounting systems (albeit not the one posted) have a model of a ledger transaction that is basically a list of "postings". Each posting is something moving from or moving to an account. In any transaction you can have many postings with negative or positive values, but the total negatives and positives has to balance. Some software restricts you to predefine accounts to be sub accounts of equity, asset or liability but for the most part there are no other restrictions, it's very flexible, you can set up whatever system you want.

E.g. ( from ledger cli documentation )

   2004/09/29  Circuit City
    Assets:Reimbursements:Company XYZ         $100.00
    Liabilities:MasterCard                   $-100.00
    Company XYZ:Expenses:Computer:Software    $100.00
    Company XYZ:Accounts Payable:Your Name   $-100.00

What I genuinely don't understand is how is this not equivalent to:

   2004/09/29  Circuit City                      DEBITS    CREDITS
    Assets:Reimbursements:Company XYZ         $100.00
    Liabilities:MasterCard                              $100.00
    Company XYZ:Expenses:Computer:Software    $100.00
    Company XYZ:Accounts Payable:Your Name              $100.00

My understanding is that as long as you don't use negative numbers the two forms have the same expressiveness.

Please note that I am only challenging the method of encoding, not the rest of accounting. How you set up and manage a chart of accounts and how you take real world transactions and code them into your system IS very important and I very much acknowledge 1400 years of evolution on that front.

This topic genuinely interests me and I have questions. If you don't mind please drop me an email (it's in my profile) I have a few questions.

p.s. Accounting standards vary. I work with startups in the US (little to no standards).

[bokstavkjeks]

Oh, I get what you mean now. A system like you show is essentially debits/credits, yes. For a lot of the smaller accounting systems, they actually print the GL in the format you show where negative numbers are equivalent to credit and positive to debit. As long as you use the same accounts it should be equivalent.

>p.s. Accounting standards vary. I work with startups in the US (little to no standards).

That's true. Here in Norway, all financial statements are publicly available regardless of company size, so they have to adhere to NGAAP (or IFRS if they're big enough).