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I wrote this a long time ago. It does tend to upset some people, but it did work as an accurate and testable mental model:

https://django-hordak.readthedocs.io/en/latest/accounting-fo...

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I like that. The fourth rule, "flipped on display" makes it conceptually a lot easier than the lengthy table of sign rules for different accounts that my boss kept on his wall.

A way I learned about it was that you want to be able to know the tangible cash value of your business at any given moment.

Thank you for writing and sharing that. It's one of the simplest and sane explanations I've seen. How did discussions go with accountants separating the debits/credits into being a presentation issue?

Well, they didn’t like it! :) I considered just providing views onto the tables that would present the data in the way that made the accountants happy. But in the end we just ended up changing to using separate debit/credit columns. They managed to talk me around somehow, but I don’t remember the details any more. I think this was the relevant issue:

https://github.com/adamcharnock/django-hordak/issues/59

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