[kowdermeister]

As a complete accounting noob, why should I use this?

How is this supposed to help me instead of listing the transactions from my own sales_history table of my local DB?

Do I need to create a GUI for your service listing the transactions?

Let's say I implement your service. You have all transaction data, fine, then what? :)

[hughjeremy]

Hi kowdermeister! Thanks for taking a peek at Amatino, I'm super excited to answer your question, I'll try to keep it brief...

In my fantasy land, Amatino has replaced your 'sales_history' table completely, from an accounting perspective. As your business grows and your needs grow more complex, you would make calls to Amatino rather than developing new internal solutions.

For example, perhaps your sales_history table is implicitly denominated in Euros, but you expand into the US and now need to store U.S. Dollar amounts. In Amatino, you could instantly create a USD revenue account, and proceed to view a combined balance of all revenue accounts.

The time you would have spent dealing with manipulating double-entry data instead goes into making your product more awesome.

Obviously Amatino has a long way to go to earn that level of trust!

[kowdermeister]

Thanks for taking the time to answer, but I don't get why should I opt-in to double entry bookkeeping. For someone who wants to build a side-project this is the last thing I want to think about.

Also, if you track sales in euros and dollars, then how do you track the changes in the exchange ratios?

What about rest? What happens to the data you aggregate? It just sounds like more work for me to make it available to my accountant.

[hughjeremy]

Oh! I see, I apologise, I may have misinterpreted your question. Amatino would be applicable to someone who is building a project that needs double-entry bookkeeping to function. For example, they might be a fintech startup building an early invoice payment trading platform. Rather than building their own double-entry layer, they could leverage Amatino.

If double-entry accounting only exists in your project insofar as you need to account for your own business, then, as you say, Amatino would probably be an excessive solution creating unnecessary work.

Aside, on the topic of exchange rates - Amatino has built in daily exchange rates between each of 36 major currencies (You can also feed it your own, if you want more resolution / different units of account). It also automagically computes unrealised gains and losses.