Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

https://www.feram.io/blog/2018-06-05_transity_the_future_of_plain_text_accounting/

by adius • 8 years ago

190 138 8 years ago

feram.io

airstrike• 8 years ago

+1 for YAML. Thanks for not using JSON.

Now I want to see someone take, say, Tiffany & Co's latest 10-Q⁽¹⁾ and run it through this.

__________

¹ https://www.bamsec.com/filing/9824618000198?cik=98246

strkek• 8 years ago

The article doesn't say which version, though.

ericsoderstrom• 8 years ago

Why do you prefer YAML to JSON in this context?

sushisource• 8 years ago

No judgement, but can someone explain to me the use case for this sort of thing? I'd imagine for anything other than the simplest stuff, you're going to start using something a bit more powerful, and for the simple stuff - who with the skills and knowledge of this type of tool really needs to do small time pocketbook budgeting?

LVB• 8 years ago

I'm not sure what your point of reference is for the question, but at least for personal finance tracking I think such tools work well. I have a long history with apps such as Quicken and Mint, and some years ago I migrated to plain text (https://www.ledger-cli.org/) and have not felt any lack of functionality. I think the type of person who would even consider these types of tool also tends to value the flexibility of being able to get data in and out of the system however they want.

hannibalhorn• 8 years ago

I can't speak to Transity, but I use HLedger for my entity (nothing fancy, just a single member LLC.)

I can keep my ledger in git, I don't need to pay for or even learn to use QuickBooks, I can quickly write a script to import data from basically anywhere, and I can use all the standard tools in my toolbox (grep, diff, python) to visualize and work with the data.

I'm sure mainstream accounting programs add value as the organization grows, but I spent a few minutes playing with Quickbooks and I was ready to just use Excel when I discovered the whole plain text accounting thing. And it's been working well for me.

nodesocket• 8 years ago

I also have a single member LLC, but can't understand the advantages of using a cli tool over Quickbooks. Beyond the obvious transactions list and graphs of income and expenses, Quickbook self-employed estimates quarterly taxes and even allows me to make payments to the IRS directly via eftps.gov. At tax time, it exports all transactions tagged and categorized to TurboTax.

brianjoseff• 8 years ago

from where/how are you getting your data in?

ams61102• 8 years ago

I used ledger to keep the books as treasurer for a small non-profit for a few years. It worked really well for me but the problem came with handing it off to the next person or thinking about involving an accountant to do the annual reports. Very few are going to be able to deal with a text file of journal entries. QuickBooks is the standard for all small business accounting, like it or not.

djhworld2• 8 years ago

I use beancount for personal finances.

I've only recently moved to it in fact, previously used tools like YNAB and so on, but this approach seems to be a bit more flexible, especially around managing investments etc

I think you need to have the mindset for it, I've always reconciled my transactions and like to keep an overview of everything, so people saying it's tedious etc doesn't wash with me, in an odd way I sort of enjoy it

erikb3• 8 years ago

Probably an interesting read for you: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1e4Vz3wZB_8-ZcAwIFde8X5Cj...

Immortalin• 8 years ago

Pivot and build an accounting API!

If you are interested, drop me an email, I would love to discuss more about fintech (I run a fintech startup)

stevievee3• 8 years ago

"Simple - No more confusing debit / credit / asset / liability mumbo jumbo"

It is just "mumbo jumbo" to you because accounting/finance is not your area of expertise.

chad_oliver• 8 years ago

Sure, but that just means they're creating a product for a specific market -- one whose area of expertise isn't accounting or finance. This is something we should encourage, rather than nitpicking the wording.

stevievee3• 8 years ago

I am not nitpicking at all. All of the things the author said are "mumbo jumbo" are fundamental to keeping proper books. Proper bookkeeping is also regulated so it is not just my opinion.

gamblor9563• 8 years ago

Those are extremely basic financial terms. If you (meaning the generic you, not you specifically) can't understand them you really shouldn't be doing your own accounting.

It would be like creating a niche programming IDE for people who don't understand the term "computer" or "programming" or "code."

adrianratnapala3• 8 years ago

Accounting is not my area of expertise, but I have been learning it -- in simple terms -- by doing my personal accounts. When I started, I found these distinctions confusing, but I assumed they were wise. Now I find them arbitrary and annoying, although I am less confused by them.

I suspect there will be a third stage where I will learn their true value. But I also strongly expect that the value lies in them being a common language that other accountancy uses. If so, then they will never be useful in my own personal accounts.

hosh3• 8 years ago

Some mathematicians had constructed a group (Pacioli Group) to analyze the characteristics of using such a system. One thing a double-entry system can do that a single-entry cannot is to quickly verify the consistency of the transactions. The specific names of "debit", "credit", etc. are jargon. The properties that allow for quick verification works on more complex transactions.

I might use a single-entry ledger for my personal finances (though I prefer the double-entry). I wouldn't run a business on it though.

cgio• 8 years ago

Further to the sibling reply on Pacioli groups, you might find Ellerman interesting. I copy a link [1] but he has lots of material on his website, including a book. He discusses the group perspective of double entry and gets some extensions on e.g. multidimensional accounting mostly targeted towards his interest in property theory.

[1] http://www.ellerman.org/the-math-of-double-entry-bookkeeping...

TeMPOraL• 8 years ago

Somebody should write a proper "accounting for regular people" guide, because I too find those terms confusing - and also completely separated for any experience ever that I had with money. And it only gets worse from there, with "accounts receivable" and "accounts payable". Is that an American thing? I try not to fall into the trap of being proud of my own ignorance; but after many hours of reading introductory accounting articles linked by various accounting software sites, I still don't get any of it.

I'd love a cheat-sheet or plain-English example of how to model the following with GAAP: I'm an individual, I have couple bank accounts, get a salary and occasional invoice, I pay for various stuff, I sometimes use cash. I do not own shares in companies. I want to do budgeting, including some sort of "envelopes" or "virtual accounts" so that I can earmark some money for particular use. I tried to build something like that with Ledger CLI several times now, but I always bounce off the confusion about terminology, and not knowing what goes into "Equity", what into "Liabilities", etc., and why does everything expect me to have "accounts payable" and "receivable"...

Knowing what's the proper, idiomatic representation of such financial system would go a long way towards me understanding what the hell all those terms mean.

deltux• 8 years ago

I found that this tutorial [1] was really helpful to help me understand how it works, in layman's terms. I followed it with hledger [2], but it should work with any double-entry bookkeeping system. You can also find a lot of resources here [3].

[1] http://www.dwmbeancounter.com/tutorial/Tutorial.html

[2] http://hledger.org/

[3] http://plaintextaccounting.org/

mbrock• 8 years ago

Consider watching this little series on Khan Academy and then sketching out your start of year balance sheet and a month's income statement.

https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/core-fi...

This might clarify the account types (assets, liabilities, equity, income, and expense) as structuring the income/balance reports, and accrual basis accounting as the reason to have "accounts payable/receivable."

Consider also thinking of your accounts as nodes in a directed graph. When you credit account 1 and debit account 2, you draw an edge from 1 to 2, representing a transaction. The credit is the "source" and the debit the "target."

(Double entry means you record a transaction as two updates with opposite charge, so credits and debits are listed separately. This is basically an error-correcting heuristic from 15th century Italy, which is still a good practice.)

So when you send an invoice to a client, that's a transaction. You obtain an asset taken from another entity. So you credit a revenue account and debit an asset account called "accounts receivable" (it's not "cash"). When you receive the payment, you credit accounts receivable and debit cash.

bokstavkjeks4• 8 years ago

I'll try to cover the accounts payable/receivable parts at least. One of the major points of modern bookkeeping is accrual accounting, which means that we recognize economic transactions independently of the cash transaction. Since the economic transaction occurs before the cash transaction, we can't increase the cash balance so we use a short term receivables account. I realize that this explanation isn't great, so I'll try to provide an example.

Consider that you sell a product worth $1000 on the first of January and you issue an invoice to your customer that is due 30 days later (net 30 days). As of January first the economic transaction has taken place and needs to be recorded to stay consistent with the principles of accrual accounting. As we've provided the customer with a product but haven't received payment yet, we've in reality given the customer a short-term loan of $1000 which has to be recorded. Accounts payable is the overview of all of these "short-term loans" given to our customers. The ledger entry for this transaction would increase revenue and also increase this short term loan as shown below.

January 1:

c: revenue $1000 (income statement)

d: accounts receivable $1000 (balance sheet)

Whenever the customer pays for the product we have to update our balance to reflect that the loan has been paid and that the customer no longer has any outstanding debt to us. To do this we credit (decrease) accounts receivable by $1000 and debit (increase) cash on hand by $1000. Note that the second entry doesn't touch the income statement as the revenue has already been recognized.

January 30:

c: accounts receivable $1000

d: cash $1000

The final balance of our accounts at the end of the 30 day period will be:

revenues: $1000 (credit)

accounts receivable: 0

cash: $1000 (debit)

Accounts payable is the same thing, but in reverse. When purchasing from a supplier on netX terms, we've been given a short-term, interest free, loan which we have to record until we pay it. I hope this helps.

maxerickson3• 8 years ago

You'd have 5 main accounts there.

  Income:Job
  Asset:Bank1
  Asset:Bank2
  Expenses:whatever
  Liabilities:whatever

And then each transaction moves the money from one account to another. Income->Asset, Asset->Expenses, etc. Value moves into the system from income, Expenses are (more or less) transactions where value moves out of the accounting system. You track your salary but probably not the hours you work and that you spent $50 on food (Asset->Expenses:Food) but not the food.

Equity is mostly just the offsetting account for balances that aren't tracked more specifically. So beginning balances are booked against equity instead of coming from some source of income.

Liabilities are amounts that you owe. When you buy something on credit, you are receiving the thing, so you book a transaction (booking an expense against the liability). Then later you book another transaction to pay for the thing (booking a decrease in assets against the liability).

Accounts receivable and accounts payable come up because businesses care about how (and when) they recognize payments and non payments and so on. For personal accounting just put money you owe as a liability and money you are owed as an asset.

nucleardog2• 8 years ago

One thing I can suggest is since you're not actually beholden to following any sort of GAAP for your personal book keeping... is it's fine to do whatever works for you. Use your best judgement. Unless you're doing this accounting for the joy of the task in and of itself, then you've got a set of problems you're trying to solve or questions you're trying to answer and following GAAP doesn't necessarily get you any closer to those solutions in any meaningful way.

I'd echo someone else's recommendation to have one place in your hierarchy that has a balance that matches up with each physical account so you can check your work when you've entered all your transactions. Beyond that, you're basically programming a system for processing the math related to your money. You can figure it out.

I'd been muddling my way through for years due to the same inability to find any good "accounting for regular people" before I met my SO who is a CPA. Her response to my accounting methods were basically "It's wrong, but it will work just fine."

Want to allocate the money in an account to some things? Create some subaccounts, move money into them. What kind of account? Asset! Asset all the things! People sending money that's going into your chequeing account to pay future bills? Create a subaccount (you guessed it - asset) and put the money into that. Your chequeing account's balance matches up, that money is separated.

Perfect is the enemy of good.

Bromskloss2• 8 years ago

About that, isn't the difference between "debit" and "credit", and between "asset" and "liability", just a minus sign?

marcrosoft• 8 years ago

I think throwing out the terms credit/debit is a mistake. Everyone operates on GAAP and we shouldn't deviate.

stevievee3• 8 years ago

Definitely agree and I think it would have usable if it kept debits/credits.

hosh3• 8 years ago

Not only that, there are some really useful properties of the double entry system: https://arxiv.org/abs/1407.1898

That's defining a group called the Pacioli Group. One thing that is relatively easy to do with this group is to quickly verify consistency in the transactions. That is something you lose with a single-entry system.

adius3• 8 years ago

Transity isn't a single entry system. By using transactions to model financial flows it implicitly enforces that the amount is credited to the "from" account and debited to the "to" account. Therefore it's basically double entry by design.

I'm really interested if someone can show me a use case where this system is less powerful / safe than a classic double entry system.

qengho• 8 years ago

This is great!

lquist• 8 years ago

CLI tools also have the advantage that their developers don't have to waste their time building and maintaining a useless GUI, but can instead use the time to improve the tool itself

Maybe it's just me, but I stopped reading here b/c this language struck me as unnecessarily antagonistic. Just some feedback.

jeremymcanally• 8 years ago

Well, it's also non-sensical. A CLI "interface" needs a lot of thought and work behind it, too, unless you want to end up loathed by your users as something like git is.

mikeyjk• 8 years ago

I don't think it is fair to say that git users loathe it overall. I enjoy using git, is this not a common experience?

openfuture• 8 years ago

I think pijul is a counterexample to this claim. Category theory was used to find the mathematically optimal semantic (i.e. interface) for the category of files and patches (i.e. version control) and so the need to plan the command line interface has been minimized. A GUI would still require a substantial amount of work. I wouldn't go so far as to defend the somewhat exaggerated claim in the original article but I still think CLIs are easier than GUIs.

upofadown• 8 years ago

It is hardly a controversial statement, particularly in the context of something entirely text oriented like accounting.

It would be different if they were expressing the same sentiment for something like a 3D graphics editor...

callumlocke• 8 years ago

Stopped here also. Bad sign. Different tools for different jobs, no need to get emotional.

toomim• 8 years ago

Hm, the article asserts that Ledger doesn't have tags:

Sub accounts vs. Tags But what if the expense is part of another category as well, like expenses for your vacation? Well, you'd be at a loss. There is no good way to model this in ledger-likes without getting really hacky.

But that's not true. Ledger has tags. You specify a tag with:

    :tagname:

For instance:

    6-5-2018 Gave food to Bart Simpson, while on vacation
        Expenses:bart     1 orange    ; :vacation:
        Assets:food

_emacsomancer_3• 8 years ago

And Ledger has an [Emacs mode](https://github.com/ledger/ledger-mode).

yegle• 8 years ago

Also worth check out http://plaintextaccounting.org/

Personally I don't like the yaml-like syntax. I use beancount myself, and with fava (https://github.com/beancount/fava) as the UI.

erikb3• 8 years ago

This is what I was always looking for. Also loving the approach of having the UI separated.

I also don't like the yaml format for the simple reason that not all necessary information is in one line. No idea why a transaction can't be written into one line.

Also for people who love plain text, one can checkout the banking format (comes from German banks, so most info is only available in German but here's a summary): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FinTS

Gnucash should also support it, but with my bank it always fails. It's certainly not a format I would use for local storage, but it's a good source of structure and edge cases when one thinks about developing or modifying an existing format.

bobjordan• 8 years ago

The Beancount/Fava combo is just fantastic. Awesome plugin system, multi-currency, powerful but simple sql-type query language, extremely well tested, active developers, python.

Jtsummers5• 8 years ago

So I like the idea of using YAML versus ledger's format (very slightly, I'm used to ledger's format so it's not a pain point, but YAML offers some ways to make things a bit easier especially for newer folks). However, I could see a fairly trivial mapping between YAML and Ledger being developed by quicker programmers than I in less than a weekend (there's already a way to spit out s-expressions from ledger).

hledger makes some strong assumptions (IIRC) about your accounts being in assets, liabilities, income, equity, expenses. But I may be thinking of beancount for that. If I'm remembering correctly, hledger will let you do whatever you want, but some of their built in reports (like balance sheet) assume liabilities and assets as top-level accounts.

However, ledger allows you to do things like:

  personal:expenses:...
  personal:assets:...
  club:expenses:...
  wife:expenses:...

And you can specify what the prefix should be for all transactions in a region like:

  apply account personal
  2018/06/05 Gym
      Expenses:Gym       54.00 USD
      Assets:Checking
  end apply account

So everything in there is now in my personal set of accounts, eliding the prefix (which can become cumbersome). If you use this† as an example, putting things into separate code blocks via org-mode makes it trivial to conduct accounting for multiple entities.

Query: Does Transity allow for money to come from or go to multiple places? Suppose I'm traveling for work and need a more detailed accounting of my spending (they don't reimburse alcohol, perhaps):

  2018/06/05 Place with good cocktails    ; 50 USD is on me
      Work:Expenses:Travel:Food        20.00 USD
      Work:Expenses:Travel:Drinks      50.00 USD
      Liabilities:Work:CC

(with a note that I have to cover that 50 USD when paying off the card next month). I do this sort of thing just on regular shopping. I may spend a bunch of money at the store that's gifts for my girlfriend along with clothes for me. I like to know how much I've spent so I'll split it (this is more a personal curiosity thing, along with trying to stick to a budget).

I don't want to have to enter a from/to pair that's redundant (repeating the same from) for things I split like this.

Additionally, there's no need for this "perspective" aspect. If I move money to an account, its balance goes up. If I move money from it it goes down. If I am managing my girlfriend's accounts in ledger (or she is, but it's pushed into a common household file):

  2018/06/05 GF       ; lunch last week
      Jared:Assets:Cash         10.00 USD
      GF:Assets:Cash

In the report hers looks like it went down, mine like it went up. There's no need for me (if I'm managing multiple entities) to bother treating that 10 USD like it came from my income account. It is income, but it came from the GF's cash account. The income account is really only needed when you don't control or track the accounts money comes from. Your job, a gift from an uncle, lottery winnings, etc.

Same thing with a business. If I own my own LLC and "pay" myself a salary out of it (I'm assuming I also pay out my health insurance or something in this, I don't know, I don't do payroll), let's say:

  2018/06/05 Paycheck
      Jared:Assets:Checking          2000.00 USD
      Jared:Expenses:HealthInsurance  100.00 USD
      JSLCC:Expenses:PayrollStuffs    200.00 USD
      JSLLC:Assets:Checking

In all the reports, everything looks right. It's done, no need to worry about perspectives.

† https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/weaving-a-budget.html

smichael3• 8 years ago

That's correct about hledger: a few reports make assumptions about the top level account names. Until the dev-droids make this customisable, account aliases can be a workaround.

Jtsummers5• 8 years ago

Thanks for hledger. I haven't explored its capabilities fully, but I have it running on my laptop at all times (a window in my tmux config displays various reports on my accounts like current balance, uncleared balance, uncleared transactions, etc.). I find it helps me to be mindful of my money if it's only a couple keypresses away.

madhadron3• 8 years ago

There are several things wrong here:

1. The author doesn't understand bookkeeping. 2. The author doesn't somehow believes that emulated teletypes are a good substrate for building user interfaces. 3. The author has spent significant time writing a bookkeeping tool for his business instead of doing something that will move the business forward.

If you're thinking about writing an open source accounting program, spend time mastering GnuCash first. If you feel like you can't do what you need with that and cannot possibly extend it in the way that you need, then write your own.

adius3• 8 years ago

1. Feel free to back up your claim, otherwise I'm not sure how you come to that conclusion 2. It has a user interface … just not graphical 3. Well, I guess we just have different opinions on where forward is 4. I've been working with GnuCash, Ledger and Hledger and I've written several scripts to extend them (e.g. to support timestamps and not just dates, which shouldn't be asked too much for an accounting tool ), but it was always a nasty hack and so I wrote my own. Just like you said.

bokstavkjeks4• 8 years ago

I can only answer 1 from the perspective of a non-US, very junior, auditor with little experience, but I'll try.

I don't see how it handles complex transactions very well. A simple example would be VAT. Assume a 25% VAT (which is standard here). If you sell a product for $1000 cash in hand the relevant transaction would be:

C: Revenues $800

C: VAT payable $200

D: Cash $1000

An even better example would be payroll which can involve 5-15 different ledger accounts for a single employee.

The next bit can probably be solved through the notes part, but how would you attach invoices and documentation with Transity?

How do you do accounts payable or receivable with it? In addition to the balance sheet sum, the accounts pay/rec should also show the balance for each individual customer and supplier.

bestnameever• 8 years ago

this just seems way more confusing to me than debits and credits.

tarsinge• 8 years ago

No more confusing debit / credit / asset / liability mumbo jumbo

How is separating what you have (assets/liabilities) from your revenues/expenses confusing? It's basic tools to get a view of the profitability vs the Balance sheet (what the company owns) vs the cash flow.

The idea of looking at it in terms of transaction is interesting, I recommend looking at https://martin.kleppmann.com/2011/03/07/accounting-for-compu... for a good take on this idea.

Edit: typo

ransom15383• 8 years ago

Hey madhadron, you sound like you understand bookkeeping. So I have a quick question. After using Mint (from Intuit) I have everything balanced & tagged and 99% automated. I have reports, ways to export, daily/monthly/yearly totals, breakdowns by types, handle liabilities & debts, i can project net, see assets over time, etc etc. Why wouldn't a business just use mint? After watching vidoes on GnuCash like you recommend - it is like watching someone make Mint by hand. When people out there get a check (income), do they open GnuCash and start typing stuff? Really?? Mint on the otherhand, detects the income by scanning all accounts, automatically categorizes it, etc etc.

GnuCash - I could see mistakes everywhere. I don't see how this is much different than what an accountant would do in 1740 england. Why not have it all automated -- with computers??

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqAaScYVeRQ

hjek3• 8 years ago

Intuit has a history of squeezing their users:

https://web.archive.org/web/20080321021644/http://www.infowo...

https://www.cnet.com/news/intuit-products-phone-home-more-of...

Also, your company's accounting information can be sensitive, and hence you may not want to share that information with Intuit (and whoever they choose to share/sell it to).

Mint on the otherhand, detects the income by scanning all accounts, automatically categorizes it, etc etc.

Does this mean that you literally hand over your online account log in details to Intuit? Or how is this "scanning" done?

GnuCash - I could see mistakes everywhere. I don't see how this is much different than what an accountant would do in 1740 england. Why not have it all automated -- with computers??

What kind of mistakes were you noticing? (in the Youtube video below, I assume?)

erikb3• 8 years ago

The way this is formulated it looks like an automated response from an advertisement bot.

Also you know that Mint is a proprietary company which keeps and uses your data as it pleases, right? That's a huge difference to any open source tool which allows you to keep your company's data inside your company. If it uses a good file format you can also automate everything if desired.

Second, Mint sadly is not supported in many countries. If you are in the US, fine. But if you are not, e.g. your corp has a shop in Germany, then you simply can't use it at all.

I think the basic idea though is the difference between the "pay someone else to solve your problems" vs "solve problems yourself" approaches/mindsets. Each of them has their clear advantages and disadvantages and I hope we don't have to reiterate them here.

billfruit2• 8 years ago

After trying to use GNU cash for some time, I got the feeling that a personal accounting app needs to be a web based service, to enable it to be used while on the move/travelling, because I found myself building up a huge backlog of entries to be made in to the system in these situations. After about a month of use, I gave up, since the overhead of jotting down transactions and later entering into the system. I doubt GnuCash or any accounting system like that could possibly have integrated apis for pulling in transaction details from every bank, in every country of the world, atleast presently.

Now a days I use a smartphone app called walnut, which mines your SMSes for transaction data and builds up a ledger by itself, without the need for interfacing with banks directly, because in my country atleast all banks provide SMS trails for transactions.

jessedhillon2• 8 years ago

I work for Plaid. You can sign up and get a dev token that has sufficient permission to access your own bank accounts. Then you can download your transactions and format them for GNU Ledger or whichever other format you prefer.

billfruit2• 8 years ago

Does it work for any bank in any country?

cup-of-tea2• 8 years ago

I've written a tool that can import data from my various bank accounts and credit cards. It's semi-automatic. Uses machine learning to guess the correct account but I can quickly change it. I then put the finishing touches on by hand.

djhworld2• 8 years ago

I was thinking of using ML for this approach too but tbh most of my transactions are predictable, just a simple hashmap of Payee->Account works just as well.

Cleaning up the payees is the trickier part.

I guess in cases like Amazon, where you might buy a plethora of things across different accounts, ML might be helpful

krupan• 8 years ago

This exists now:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.gnucash.an...

athrun• 8 years ago

I can only speak for me, but modeling financial flows in terms of transactions and not accounts is much more intuitive than the classical alternative.

I'm a long time Buxfer user, which also works like this. It's not that I don't understand double entry bookkeeping, I've used GNUCash for a long time before moving away. It is indeed very powerful and flexible, but it always was too much of a chore to maintain and next to impossible to get other family members to contribute.

I'm not sure this "transaction model" would be appropriate for business accounting, but IMHO it works very well for Personal Finance.

kungtotte3• 8 years ago

I played around with the buxfer demo a bit, and one thing wasn't really clear to me: is it possible to schedule fixed payments? There was some kind of reminder system, but does it automatically add the transaction or will I have to log in to manually add those transactions?

Simple recurring transactions is like the one feature I really need from a tool like this.

jgalvez• 8 years ago

If you want something way simpler, http://galvez.github.io/plainbudget :)

csomar2• 8 years ago

I'm not sure why the OP is getting s%%t from the community. He built a simple application, probably out of love of software development. It is not complete or perfect. It is also probably not the best use of his business time. But we do waste time on other stuff too.

This CLI app could be useful to me for a subset of accounting I do. Yes, it won't be able to track VAT accounts. It won't amortize my expenses. But if I needed that for a critical business I'm running, I'd not use a hobby project.

The CLI is useful. Double Entry bookkeeping is useful but as things scale it gets very confusing even for the best of accountants. This program is simple and can give you a solution if you are looking for very simple bookkeeping.

eXpl0it3r3• 8 years ago

You can't expect to just get happy feedback, especially from a rather critical thinking community such as HN and when you then write dismissively about stuff, you shouldn't be surprised when it's held against you.

CLI tools also have the advantage that their developers don't have to waste their time building and maintaining a useless GUI, but can instead use the time to improve the tool itself.

It's fine if you like CLI apps and find it painful maintaining a GUI application, but it's not helpful to write it as a general statement. CLI "GUI" tools also require quite a bit of work and I'd claim that an experienced GUI developer will spend less time on creating a GUI app, than the author had spent to get their CLI "GUI" app display as wanted.

It made sense in former times as this layout makes it easier to add up the amounts by hand, but not in times of computers.

Double booking keeping isn't just a relic from the past. There are big benefits to it and just because it doesn't fit into simple account keeping, doesn't mean we can just pretend that it's useless, because computers!

In summary you simply should not write your opinions as if they were facts. You can do so if you want, but then you need to be prepared to get some critical feedback.

Bromskloss2• 8 years ago

What are the benefits of double-entry bookkeeping?

csomar2• 8 years ago

The OP is emotional/opinionated, doesn't mean we should follow suit.

Regardless of his tone, he built a small CLI tool to do basic bookkeeping that can simplify double-entry bookkeeping with transaction actions/tags.

Take it or leave it. But heavily "attacking" him is a useless practice. Maybe if you don't like it just don't upvote it and move on with your life. This toxicity is not doing good for the community here.

JustSomeNobody2• 8 years ago

I'm not sure why the OP is getting s%%t from the community.

OP states, in large font, that Transity is "The Future of Plain Text Accounting". If you're going to make a bold statement like that, then people are going to be critical.

joyinsky• 8 years ago

Basically the problem here is that the author didn't care even a little to understand why accounting is done with a double entry system.

Basically what he was trying to do here was a expense and income administrator with tags. That it's just a part of what bookkeeping and accounting is.

Nice try. But you can't replace what works and what has been done for reliability and confidence since 1400 at least by the masters of trade.

sly0102• 8 years ago

You can't replace what works and what has been done for reliability and confidence since 1400 at least by the masters of trade.

I am not sure that is true. Isn't the world full of examples of quite the opposite? Especially because it's 1400 years old an because it was created for pen an paper work. We have computers now.

e.g. It used to be that companies have a handful of yearly profit/loss accounts and every year they "close the books" by transferring all balance to first profit/loss accounts then to equity. The financial year then starts with 0 profit an 0 loss. Afaik nobody does this anymore. Today you just keep all accounts running (don't "close them) and you generate repots by selecting a date range and let the computer calculate profits and losses for that range.

Besides, most commercial software already hides debit and credit from you. I would risk that most accountant don't know their debits and credits, it's just one of those things you learn at accounting school before you start working in the industry.

I agree one should not write an accounting system without understanding the full details and history of the domain, but I disagree that 1400 year history proves anything. In fact even after reading through the Pacioli Group article I still don't see the advantages. It's only advantage is that it makes it harder to make a mistake on paper.

bokstavkjeks4• 8 years ago

I would risk that most accountant don't know their debits and credits

I've worked in accounting and this is just not true. The ledger is stated in debit/credit and all transactions are done in debit/credit. Even if modern accounting software can automate some of it it still requires the accountant to verify the transaction. Hell, most accountants I know even draw up good ol' T-accounts on paper every once in a while to understand the larger and more complex transactions. I'd think you'd be hard pressed to find an accountant that doesn't know their debit and credit. An accountant that doesn't know their debits and credits is like a software developer that only knows Scratch.

Most commercial software doesn't hide debit/credit, and if it does, you should run away as fast as you can. How do you produce the required documentation for your auditor if the software hides debit and credit?

EDIT: To continue a bit.

It used to be that companies have a handful of yearly profit/loss accounts and every year they "close the books" by transferring all balance to first profit/loss accounts then to equity. The financial year then starts with 0 profit an 0 loss. Afaik nobody does this anymore. Today you just keep all accounts running (don't "close them) and you generate repots by selecting a date range and let the computer calculate profits and losses for that range.

All companies still do this. It's part of the closing entries at the end of the FY. It's not just that the FY starts with 0 profit and 0 loss, but that that is the entire point of the financial statements. A company has three financial statements: the balance sheet, the income statement, and the cash flow statement. For this example, only the income statement and the balance sheet are relevant.

The balance sheet can be seen as a snapshot of a company. It shows what the company owns (assets) divided into short- and long-term assets, as well as how they paid for it (liabilities and equity). The concepts that it balances assets + liabilities + equity = 0 (debit is positive and credit is negative) is the foundation for the balance. The income statement shows a company's results over a given time frame, usually a year. You can consider the balance sheet permanent and the income statement temporary. Consider a company with the following results per 31.12:

    assets: $10.000 (d)
    liabilities: $7 500 (c)    
    equity: $500 (c)
    net revenue: $5.000 (c)
    costs: $3.000 (d)
    profit/loss: $2.000 (c)

It's clear that the entire ledger balances per 31.12 as the sum of debit is equal to the sum of credit accounts. We also see that the company owns $10.000 worth of assets which is mainly paid for through debt, and that they have a profit of $2.000 since the profit is credit. As the income statement is supposed to reflect the performance over a given period and the balance is supposed to balance, the solution is to transfer the profit to equity to record the profit in the (permanent) balance sheet and reset the (temporary) income statement so that they can record their next fiscal year. To do this they record debit profit/loss $2.000 and credit equity $2.000.

It's also not just a matter of recording the entry, which is fairly easy on modern accounting systems, but as it involves the distribution of profit (and touching equity for that matter) it typically needs the signature of the board.

I was an external auditor and when we did the closing entries for our clients we would require the CEO's or chairman's signature on a printed version of the final entries.

I agree one should not write an accounting system without understanding the full details and history of the domain, but I disagree that 1400 year history proves anything.

Accounting isn't just a field that has had 1400 years to develop methods to solve the problem in the domain. It's a field that has had 1400 years to build regulations and exceptions. It's also a field which requires a lot of individual judgement. Take, for example, VAT. Here in Norway, the actual VAT law text is about 10% of the text in the handy VAT exceptions and judgement calls book we had in the office.

Writing accounting software that is actually useful for an extended period of time is incredibly difficult due to how accounting laws change all the time. Double the effort if you want the software to make tax returns as well. The company that developed the software we used had personal relations with almost all of their customers and would ask for feedback all the time. They probably shipped three versions during the busy season I was there.

I'm admittedly a fan of double-entry bookkeeping as it's conceptually easy (once learned) to map out complex transactions on a piece of paper.

99% of accounting is bog-standard, but that last 1% is complex as all hell. It can't really be ignored either as it can end up costing you or your client a significant amount of money, or even jail time.

I can't really state specifics, but I had a client whose bookkeeper failed to stay up to date on a very specific subset of a rather specific law which ended up costing the client millions in extra taxes. To put it in perspective, they suddenly had back-taxes for more than their company made in a year in revenues. This change was so specific that there wouldn't have been any consequences if they had done it a few weeks earlier. I'm rambling a bit here, but the point is, if you want to write a new type of accounting software, be really sure you know what you're doing.

perfunctory2• 8 years ago

the author didn't care even a little to understand why accounting is done with a double entry system

I don't know where you got this idea from. I got an impression the author knows a few things about accounting.

Hello71• 8 years ago

everyone is complaining about the accounting here, but I just want to say that 100 FONT WEIGHT AT #666 ON WHITE IS NOT AN ACCEPTABLE CONTRAST RATIO FOR BODY TEXT, especially if you do not provide your own font. even on a 1920x1080 IPS display with 1.1x scaling, using my preferred font, Noto Sans, font-weight 100 is extremely difficult to read for long stretches. DejaVu Sans's 100 is slightly thicker, but is still not acceptable for body text at that color.

Uplink• 8 years ago

THANK YOU!

I had the ideas used in this project in my head, but I've been putting off the work forever now.

I LOVE YOU FOREVER for using transactions as the central operation rather than double entry accounting, and I love you even more for adding the ability to tag transactions. I can not put off work for a web interface instead, which is a lot less work to put off :)

I haven't tried it yet, but it's now high on my list for when I get home from work.

JustSomeNobody2• 8 years ago

If this looks (and sounds) confusing or too complicated, you're not alone! It made sense in former times as this layout makes it easier to add up the amounts by hand, but not in times of computers.

Math predates computers, let's just stop using that too!

Double entry is not that complicated and computers or not, it just works.

perfunctory2• 8 years ago

I have a question for people who understand accounting. Isn't the reason for debit/credit split the fact that negative numbers were not yet invented/widely-known at the time? Would accounting look different if it was designed today?

avodonosov• 8 years ago

I tried to use Ledger, but it fails to handle multi currency ac ounting properly. Is the Transity well suited for that?

fiatjaf• 8 years ago

This is amazing. Thank you for making this. I agree: account-based accounting is not the perfect form, transactions can be much clearer. People here are suffering from status quo bias.

Jtsummers5• 8 years ago

To be clear, most accounting tools still have you recording transactions in a journal (including ledger-cli, the one they were specifically comparing Transity to). Money moves between accounts, but you record it as transactions showing the from and to information.

The accounts are the things you want to review after you record a transaction, to ensure balances are correct (validate your checking account with what the bank says it should be) and to understand your financial situation (current net worth and cash flow).

Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

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