
Up The Asset: Modern Accounting on the Open Web - zacharyvoase
http://blog.zacharyvoase.com/2011/01/18/up-the-asset/
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jacques_chester
>The advent of the computer should have been enough.

The advent of the computer revolutionised the accounting profession. Gone are
the thousands of accounting clerks who used to laboriously update ledger books
and sum up figures. Accountants _are not bookkeeepers_.

> By modelling a company as a complex information network, the in- and out-
> flows of each part of the business will act as signals and semaphores
> revealing reckless spending, potential embezzlement, or unsuccessful
> ventures. Collecting information allows for an empirical, scientific
> approach to management, based on actual performance, and backed up by
> numbers.

This _is_ what accountants do. But the world is filled with ambiguity and
unusual corner cases. Accountants organise all the monetary relationships of a
business into a hierarchy, and like any hierarchy, it has annoying things that
could fit into one of several places.

Part of accounting is to identify these anomalies as they emerge (and given
the indefinite complexity of the economic world, they emerge constantly) and
to come to a consensus on them. This is the source of the GAAP and IASB
standards. This is necessary so that accountants can communicate information
to each other in an honest, comparable fashion.

It is a profound and common mistake of software types to say: "that's stupid.
That's simple. I could reinvent that, 100x better, in a weekend!"

Well good luck with that. (Sometimes they're right. But rarely).

> Unfortunately, the landscape of publicly-available accounting software is
> rather poor.

This may be true down the bottom of the foodchain, but accounting software
gets profoundly sophisticated as you move up to larger and larger
organisations.

Like lawyers, we in software engineering are smugly certain that ours is the
hardest of professions, ourselves the brightest of the professionals. Self-
serving, chauvinistic tosh. We could use a bit more modesty. Refer to the Tao
of Programming.

~~~
krschultz
Everything looks simple and easy from the surface.

Nine times out of ten when I hear a developer (or engineer, or lawyer, or wall
streeter, or doctor, or contractor, almost anyone) saying something else is
trivial or easy, it says a lot more about how little the person knows about
the subject matter than the actual complexity of the subject at hand.

I can't think of one thing in my life that is gets simpler as you learn more.
It is all corner cases and esoteric solutions to non-obvious problems as you
get more advanced. Engineering, software, math, physics, language, philosophy,
economics, politics, design, and every single sport I've ever played (not to
mention most relationships) only seem to get more complicated the deeper you
dive into them.

~~~
tomjen3
How does politics get more complicated as you drill down into it?

Its about getting as much as possible for your self while giving all the blame
on the "other" group.

I agree with the other examples you have listed, but politics isn't nearly
that complicated, nor are those involved smart.

~~~
jacques_chester
> How does politics get more complicated as you drill down into it?

Speaking as a former student politician and candidate for Parliament: yes. Yes
indeed.

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duncanj
Aside from being written in compiled languages, are Ledger and hledger not a
good starting point? <https://github.com/jwiegley/ledger/wiki>
<http://hledger.org/>

~~~
sivers
Yes! I came in here to recommend those, too.

I was about to re-invent that wheel, too. See <http://thoughts.pro/beekeep/>

But when I heard of Ledger I abandoned it. A lot of great work has been put
into Ledger.

UpTheAsset looks like a great project, too, but someone should be fully aware
of Ledger before reinventing that wheel.

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kondro
Actually, the record-keeping party of accounting _is_ simple and most
accounting software packages store their data in much the same way as this
post is proposing.

The complicated part of accounting, and the reason why we need actual accounts
is the regulatory issues surrounding money and how to manage/tax it.

Real accountants (not just book-keepers) provide 'advice' on how to handle
money, they don't go around balancing books and shuffling paper. This may have
been what accountants did in the 1950's, but computers made all this 'busy'
work obsolete and left them to do what humans are good at… thinking and
problem solving.

~~~
arethuza
Financial reporting for large multinational enterprises is decidedly non-
trivial - of course each individual part is fairly simple when looked at in
isolation but the complexities soon multiply up - especially as data is highly
dimensional (at least 12 dimensions are common) and also hierarchical.

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krschultz
My roommate in college was an accounting and comp sci double major. He became
an accountant after college. Never have I heard him say "you know, I could
replace my entire job with a computer program". Nor have I heard him really
complain about the software he uses at work.

This makes me think the problem isn't really with the software available to
your average full-time accountant.

Maybe the real issue lies with small businesses that need some accounting, but
it is not what they do 100% of everyday (but isn't that what Quickbooks is
for?)

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talbina
But is there really a problem with modern accounting systems?

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lsc
very interesting. I wonder how much more code I'd need to write to use this as
a backend to handle billing my customers?

I've been looking for a simple billing component that I could then link in to
the rest of my system to handle billing, rather than the large, complex and
difficult to modify integrated provisioning, billing and management system I
currently use.

~~~
jacques_chester
> I wonder how much more code I'd need to write to use this as a backend to
> handle billing my customers?

More than you'd expect. Plus you are now relying entirely on yourself to
remain abreast of changes to the law and accounting practices.

The division of labour is not some kind of personal affront to programmers,
mate.

~~~
lsc
The job of the billing system is not to "remain abreast of changes to the law
and accounting practices." That's the job of the accountant. I have a good
accountant. The job of the billing system is to keep track of who owes me how
much money.

I mean, I have an accountant for dealing with the law, with deprecation, and
other more complex subjects. but I'm not going to make my accountant bill an
$8/month customer.

~~~
jacques_chester
So you want to keep your books, is that all? Because in fairness I wouldn't
fiddle writing software myself. I'd rather use Xero or a POBKS* for something
like that.

(*) Plain Old Book Keeping Service

~~~
lsc
well, my sister does the bookkeeping that doesn't require an accountant, you
know, dealing with buying equipment and such, and we're still sorting that out
(I'm having the accountant train her, so it's probably more expensive, for now
at least, than a regular bookkeeper would be, but that will change once she's
up to speed.) Really, though, that's not the problem. Yeah, I buy equipment
every month, but not that much equipment. For a while I was having the
accountant do that bookkeeping for me, and it worked okay (though that was a
whole lot more expensive than a regular bookkeeper. Accountants charge a lot
more than bookkeepers.) You are talking in the low tens of transactions a
month, if you don't count my small customers, so accounting for my expenses
and income from large customers can be done manually even using rather
expensive labor.

But I have a rather large number of very small customers. my median customer
is probably close to $8 or $12 a month. Considering that I've got to pay for
power/hardware out of that, really, if it requires /any/ human intervention
for every monthly bill, even if that human bills me at bookkeeper rates rather
than accountant rates, I'll have to raise my prices, probably above that of
the competition, which uses custom in-house billing software, as far as I can
tell.

~~~
jacques_chester
I'd consider using a service, in that case. I think Xero does this sort of
auto-billing stuff; in Australia MYOB will do it for you also. If you haven't
already, consider using a payment gateway service to take money from credit
cards.

Good luck with your business.

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ricochat
Computers should put complexity accountants out of business, it's a shame they
haven't did that yet.

This approach seems really implementation oriented.

~~~
lsc
I'm not sure what a "complexity" accountant is, but there is more to
accounting than software. Yeah, you need a bookkeeper to input stuff, and that
sort of thing can be automated more and more, but someone needs to actually
understand what is going on. Especially when it comes to taxes and the like,
the 'obvious' answer is quite often wrong.

Much like programming, in accounting there are many "That word, I do not think
it means what you think it means" moments. Sure, if you can put the right
numbers in the right boxes, and the computer program was designed to the exact
sort of business you have, yeah, it could do a lot of the accounting tasks.
But the problem is much more complex than it seems.

