darcys22

Shameless self plug: ive been building a similar open source command line accounting system

https://github.com/darcys22/godbledger

Its heavily inspired by both ledger and beancount but my biggest issue with them is that text files arnt great for double entry bookkeeping. Having a relational database is the better option which is what GoDBLedger has.

After a certain point a business cant keep track of its transactions in text files because there are simply too many of them, so these systems really only scale to personal finance levels (few hundred transactions maybe thousand transactions).

In addition building plugins that can import your whole text file into a sql system so you can query them is redundant. Just have it in a relational database to start with.

Thank you! Yeah thats pretty much my feeling too. The software out there always puts itself in your way to make their walled gardens more profitable

Oh yeah 100%

Right now its just the core functionality. But now I'm starting to think about all the scripts I can run can track everything happening in my personal life. So things like tracking my bank accounts, linking the data with my budgeting spread sheets. So much to build!!

Hello Hackernews!

I've been building an open source Accounting System and have finally the web interface to a point were I can do a Demo vid!

GoDBLedger is meant to be an accounting system for programmers who want to write scripts for their financial transactions, and then give you access to the database so you can analyse the transactions using whatever analytics software you are comfortable with.

Check it out on github:

https://godbledger.com/ https://github.com/darcys22/godbledger

I also did some cool things with Metabase in an older video, we built a financial dashboard which showed your income month by month live and updated whenever GoDBLedger received a manual journal. That demo video can be found here:

https://youtu.be/PeQR7GseFQI

Happy to discuss any an all things about accounting, and would love any feedback that Hackernews has for this project!

Cheers Sean

Its almost entirely done on crypto twitter. You follow the builders and they talk about this stuff. Tweet threads are terrible but that is where the good information is.

Twitter is frustrating in that the good content is buried and if you follow the wrong people they just spam your feed.

Its a constant battle to keep the signal to noise ratio of your feed high and the right people to follow constantly changes.

Makes it easier to remember :)

I’ve been building an open source accounting system in go.

https://github.com/darcys22/godbledger

Id love for any seasoned golang experts to do a review of my code and highlight any areas that could be improved.

Is the third way just open source? Vitaliks discussion here is about platforms gathering data about their users.

They dont fall neatly at all. Yes all the accounts you have described can be categorised fairly easily but they are all pretty trivial examples.

Harder accounts are things like tracking inventory. Yes you have the easy "Inventory" account on the balance sheet, but what about the "Opening Balance", "Purchases" and "Closing Balance" accounts that live on the profit and loss. They are all debit positive accounts but two of those always carry a credit balance and should be presented as a negative on the P&L.

If you want to be pedantic then probably those 3 accounts combined make up an expense account. But accountants split them out to make the financials easier to process. And the account split into 3 sub accounts for better presentation doesnt fit into the broad categories, but its still normal practice.

There are both debit and credit loans depending on who is loaning who. The two parties are the person recording the transaction and an external third party.\\

A debit to a loan account only reduces it if it is a credit loan. A debit to a debit loan account actually increases it (Think a bank giving further money to their customers).

If you are debiting a loan account it means the external third party is giving cash to the person recording the transaction.

If you issue a refund then you are giving cash to the external third party so its a negative (credit). Then the positive side of the journal is against your income account (reducing your income).

Debits and Credits are not positive and negative, but they are a concept that was invented before negative numbers existed and are perfectly represented by positive and negative numbers.

This highlights the stumbling block that programmers have when trying to understand debits and credits. You should not at all be trying to classify your accounts as Liab/Eq/Inc, its simply an account with a debit or credit balance.

Its why i dislike the accounting equation. Its leads people to really overvalue how important account types are.

On the database level you dont care at all about it. The accounts are simply another text column and the bare minimum has no further information.

Only when trying to present the accounts in a P&L or something do you try to ascertain what the type is. Even then the only essential information is whether the account is debit or credit positive, and maybe whether it is a P&L or balance sheet account.

Its at this point here that you could optionally classify the account as Liab/Eq/Inc to give you some nice headers for the financial reports but to be honest you could just throw that back on the user and let them classify their own headers. Accountants are normally better at knowing what their financials should look like and forcing them to comply with your account types is probably a limiting and frustrating anti feature.

Everyone in this thread is crying scam because HN hates crypto. However the NBA teams and players love NFTs.

https://hypebeast.com/2021/12/steph-curry-breaks-all-time-nb...

https://www.nba.com/heat/nft

https://nbatopshot.com/

The less interesting reason is that the 76ers are doing NFTs and they have engaged a team to assist with this.

I find what you have said harder to follow than just knowing debits are positive and credits are negative.

The A=L+OE formula is a poor model for understanding accounting when the accounts dont fall neatly into those 5 high level categories. And unfortunately you almost immediately encounter accounts of that nature (accumulated depreciation and loans are great examples).

Melbourne here, its not that bad.

The narrative is mostly being spun but the anti-lockdown parties in the USA trying to push their own agenda.

Yeah i agree, twitch and youtube are producing a new type of celebrity where the content can be created by anyone. Its build your own content, create your own community and do it all yourself. This is disrupting the old entertainment industry where you needed many well connected people to connect you to the audience, and your content was reviewed heavily by ‘experts’ before production.

The content is easier to produce due to technology, and this is personal opinion but its way better than what was made by television studios etc.

On the ethereum chain you get slashed (on both your chains) for signing two messages.

Einstein is a bad example cause he was very recent also.

This is a very interesting thought to explore! We have this cultural default to assume that people back then were less smart than us. But we really are exactly the same but we have a better starting point then they did to build interesting things.

The best social network these days is a smallish closed group chat on your favourite platform.

There are apps that exist already to keep these private if you wish. But the key is curating the chat so there is good signal from friends who arnt starting flame wars.

He lost me at the part where he thinks you can sign messages after withdrawing your stake.

The whole point of proof of stake is that you can only sign blocks or messages while you have something staked. When you withdraw you are no longer allowed to sign anything.

He also didnt need to spend 1000 words going on about the history of bitcoin and proof of work.

This is literally just a filler piece with a provocative clickbait title to stir up the anti cryptocurrency folks here

Then they would be able to get their ethereum collateral back for free

Counter point: i find the expectation to have a camera turned on rude.

Different people have different expectations and there are probably a lot of reasons for the wide variety.

However it kinda sounds like you have a different expectation than the team you work with. Would be mindful of taking the stance that ‘everyone else is wrong’

Of course :)

This has also been my opinion for the accounting industry. Just like c compilers before gcc were proprietary and poor performing the accounting software that exists has many limitations. That means there is a huge opportunity for an open source system to blow them out of the water.

Ive been building one myself but i know there are many more coming for this industry :)

https://github.com/darcys22/godbledger

Except the world knows who the creator is and your 1s and 0s aint it

It didnt really. It was just cryptocurrency = bad

Session does all those things.

The political view on cryptocurrency that causes you to label it as a bad thing means you blanket category something that adds a lot of features to session.

I think tors uptake in general was limited because the FBI was able to still to track people, and here the cryptocurrency element fights against exactly that.

Also the oxen blockchains state growth is pretty mild. Its currently 20gb after 4 years. Even moneros blockchain is pretty mild which gets heavy use (sub 100gb i believe).

State growth is an issue all blockchains face, but there are ways of addressing it. If oxens blockchain gets to 200gb in 40 years though i dont think that is an unreasonable expectation to put on the people running nodes.

Your statement on the intelligence agencies is incorrect. You need oxen to run the nodes not dollars, and obtaining oxen has an exponential cost due to market forces.

If you want to run 1 node you can obtain the oxen pretty easily. If you want to obtain enough oxen to control 50% of the network you will need to buy more oxen than is in existence.

In sessions case the cryptocurrency is a protective measure thats stops eve from spinning up loads of nodes on their backend and snooping the message packets.