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Comment by howeyc | Hacker News Reader

I agree, I don't understand how creating two entries in two separate locations is a good thing. You have to constantly monitor that you have matching entries everywhere. No thanks.

Instead, have a master list of transactions with money in/out in each transaction. As long as every transaction balances, you are golden.

Balances, history, cash flow, etc. can all be figured out from this one central location.

This is how ledger-cli works.

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I haven't used ledger, but it seems to be double entry accounting too. According to the example:

    2015/10/12 Exxon
        Expenses:Auto:Gas         $10.00
        Liabilities:MasterCard   $-10.00

whereas I would have something like:

    2015/10/12   Exxon  $10.00  MasterCard  ->  Gas

The idea would be that the form of the transaction doesn't allow you to screw up - it is neccessarily balanced because you only give the amount once. A bit like a typed language only allows well-formed programs to run.

Modern accounting systems like most ERPs allow you to specify the account and offset account in one line. It pretty much like you describe and is the preferred method for simple entries with only two accounts.

It gets a bit trickier when, for example, sales tax is involved where a simple example for a sale of $1.000 with 25% VAT would be:

  cr. revenues                $800
  cr. VAT patable             $200
  dr. accounts receivable    $1000

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