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Comment by jasim | Hacker News Reader

That part of the article felt quite wrong to me as well. I've built accounting systems that worked well for a decade, where internally the values were a single amount column in the journal table. If it was a debit, it'd be positive, if a credit, it'd be negative.

In fact, we could call these values yin and yang, for all it mattered.

Also, I'm not able to really follow what he means by "money = assets in the future".

Money is money, but if you wanted to track the intermediate state until the customer gets receipt, you would use an In Transit account (Good In Transit / Service In Transit etc.)

Yet, it doesn't change the fundamental definition of the value in the accounting system. I think the author confuses an engineering concept (sagas, or thunks, or delayed but introspectable/cancellable actions in general) with accounting.

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> Also, I'm not able to really follow what he means by "money = assets in the future".

I’m guessing it’s one of two things:

1. A transaction might fail. If you enter a transaction into your bank’s website or your credit card company’s website, you should probably record it in your ledger right away. But the transaction might get canceled for any number of reasons. And the money will not actually move instantly, at least in the US with some of the slower money moving mechanisms.

2. In stocks and other markets, settlement is not immediate. A trade is actually a promise by the parties to deliver the assets being traded at a specific time or range of times in the future. One probably could model this with “in transit” accounts, but that sounds quite unpleasant.

FWIW, I’ve never really been happy with any way that I’ve seen accounting systems model accruals and things in transit. I’ve seen actual professional accountants thoroughly lose track of balance sheet assets that are worth an exactly known amount of cash but are a little bit intangible in the sense that they’re not in a bank account with a nice monthly statement.

Money never moves instantly : light speed is a limit (and also something can always happen to the message(s).

This isn't really the issue I think, the question is whether money always moves fast enough that you can model them differently— as an atomic object that either exists and is complete or doesn't exits at all. Can you just have the caller wait some milliseconds and either get an error or a success meaning it's done? The answer is of course no but there are plenty of things that can be modeled this way.

IMO it's entirely wrong, and it also makes it a lot more difficult to programmatically create transactions with 3+ legs (For example: A payment with a line item + sales tax).

I think the author is just wrong on that point, but the rest is sound. (Source: I've built bookkeeping software)

There are no 3 leg transactions in a ledger. You described an order. Ledger transactions is one layer deeper. Order creates 2 different transactions: Payment correspond to payments accounts, taxes to the Taxes Payable. That is how classic bookkeeping works.

Sorry what? No, I'm describing a transaction. There is nothing preventing n-leg transactions in a ledger. Neither a physical one, nor a digital one.

They're complicated to balance, so it's not commonly done in physical ledgers for sure, but in digital ledgers it's completely fine. You just have to make sure they do balance.

Orders are not relevant for ledgers. The system I describe is relevant for individual transactions -- for example, a single bank payment that pays for two outstanding invoices at once absolutely SHOULD create a single transaction with three legs: One out of the bank account, two to payables.

A single bank payment for two outstanding invoices to a single entity or two different entities? In the later case there should be different accounts credited. Technically it is possible to account, but a bank should obey the accounting practices and generate multiple transactions on different accounts. The higher level document could be atomic indeed, so it either registers as a batch or not registers at all.

In the former case, yes, not the latter. Real-life scenario: You have a supplier doing both staff outsourcing and material supplies, you have two outstanding invoices in each of those categories, your pending payments in those are tracked separately (for whatever reason), and you do a single bank payment for both.

Anyway, this is just a simple example, but an invoice with VAT on it is IMO the most common example. Or, another one my software support: A bank transaction with embedded banking fees. Some do separate fees, not all. Currency conversion fees are another example.

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