That's an interesting approach to explaining the theory!

Two observations:

- I've taught introductory book-keeping and accounting to software engineers, PMs and finance people at a few large tech companies, and found that having them actually enter a bunch of debits/credits into Excel or Google Sheets makes a big difference to their comprehension, and flushes out the parts they didn't really 'get'.

- The one thing I'm sad to see missing from that post is the idea that profit is the derivative of the company's book value, with respect to time (assuming no new shares are issued, and no dividends are paid). People are often confused about why profit and cash flow are different. The main reason is that profit is a measure of the change in book value, and not everything that has value is cash.

Oh, and one slight inaccuracy: "The total of the balance sheet is a lower bound on the value of your company.". This is not strictly true: a company is worth what someone is willing to pay for it, and that could be even less than book value. Assets are not marked to market, but valued based on historical cost. The assets may not be worth as much as the book value and/or they may be useless to the company and/or they may be hard to liquidate (sell).

I second this.

As the owner of a bootstrapped business, I found that post immensely helpful; well, that, and a couple hour tutorial on Quickbooks with my CPA.

I can't stress enough how useful (cathartic, even) doing our accounting ourselves has been to running our business.

Good article, I submitted it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11240888

Wow! Thanks for this link. Reading this makes me question if relational db-s best way to design accounting software.