This is so nicely presented it’s tempting me to have Claude whip up an implementation.
Just need aome form of graphic persistence then ways of summing across partitions of nodes to generate reports. And some convenience methods for adding transactions.
Final step would be to slap a CLI or UI on top of everything.
It's a good comment but I think to make something intuitive you really need to understand why something exists and I think for most people there just isn't in fact a good reason.
If you know it, it's easy to use, so why not? But if you don't, whatever method you come up with to track account balances and revenues vs. expenses is going to be useful enough. For individuals not accounting for receivables, debts, depreciation properly isn't likely to make a big difference.
Previously:
Accounting for computer scientists (2011) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37940973 - Oct 2023 (50 comments)
Accounting for Computer Scientists - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15446202 - Oct 2017 (1 comment)
Accounting for Computer Scientists - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2298471 - March 2011 (75 comments)
This is so nicely presented it’s tempting me to have Claude whip up an implementation.
Just need aome form of graphic persistence then ways of summing across partitions of nodes to generate reports. And some convenience methods for adding transactions.
Final step would be to slap a CLI or UI on top of everything.
The last time this was posted on HN (October 2023), I posted this comment which I think makes it easy to understand the fundamentals of accounting:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37951781
It's a good comment but I think to make something intuitive you really need to understand why something exists and I think for most people there just isn't in fact a good reason.
If you know it, it's easy to use, so why not? But if you don't, whatever method you come up with to track account balances and revenues vs. expenses is going to be useful enough. For individuals not accounting for receivables, debts, depreciation properly isn't likely to make a big difference.
As someone who failed an accounting class I will definitely read this.