bokstavkjeks

While true, it's often two distinct processes. I work with implementing ERP systems, focusing on accounting and financials. Most systems I see use the ERP system to generate the invoice data and for tracking the invoice status with a separate service to create the PDF (and electronic) invoices through an integration with the ERP system. The ERP system is usually pretty good at invoice tracking but customising the invoices can be both time consuming and expensive. Among larger enterprises there's definitely a market for software that can produce PDF invoices, even without tracking, although they would probably have to support creating PEPPOL BIS compliant XML documents as well.

I don't think the file format above is especially conductive to learning. In my experience, most people learn double-entry bookkeeping with T accounts; debit is on the left, credit is on the right, and total credit has to equal total debit.

If you're interested, this seems like a fairly decent guide: https://www.open.edu/openlearn/money-business/introduction-b...

> You call it "BS" for some reason (you seem not to believe in it)

The balance sheet is typically abbreviated as BS, so a BS account is a balance sheet account.

It's been a while since I've had anything to do with goodwill, but if I remember correctly it's most commonly the difference in the assets net market value and the purchase price of a company. So if company A buys company B, which has assets of $50 for $100, then they'll add $50 in goodwill to account for the difference.

This is, of course, a simplification as I'm sure goodwill is regulated under GAAP/IFRS. But it does mean that you can't use goodwill to accurately estimate the effects of brand advertising as there could reasons other than brand marketing for a company being traded above its assets' fair market value at the time of the sale.

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

You often end up with three accounts. Asset (balance sheet), accumulated depreciation (balance sheet), and the depreciation expense account (P&L).

In which case the depreciation is cr. acc. depreciation and dr. depreciation expense.

From how I understand it, the idea behind Power Automate isn't to move programmers over to it. It's to allow other people in the business to automate their workflows without bringing in developers. No/low code systems are great for departments such as accounting and finance, they typically have some tasks that are great targets for automation, and the workers know more about the process than the developers. If the workers can create the automation without bringing in developers it can save quite a bit of resources over time. These people are also not all that keen on actually learning programming languages, source control, version control, and all of that. They just have a problem in their day-to-day work they'd like to solve.

If you want the "developer experience" (source control, some code, etc.) while also having access to the flow-based editor you should look into Azure logic apps instead.

I can only speak for Norway, but here we use different articles for the different genders. In Bokmål, a masculine noun uses "en", a feminine noun uses "ei or en", and non-gendered nouns use "et". I think it's slightly different in New Norwegian, but I don't really know it so I can't comment on that. Bokmål is closer to Swedish anyway.

I do agree that it's difficult to learn though as there are no rules for determining a noun's gender or lack thereof. I certainly don't miss memorising the genders of nouns in primary school, not to mention all the exceptions.

It's kind of a problem in that any supply problems have pretty massive effects on the price. A cyclone hit Madagascar in 2011 which significantly reduced the year's harvest, sending the prices skyrocketing [0]. Anecdotally, there was a time during 2016/2017 where my local stores couldn't even get vanilla pods.

[0] https://moneyweek.com/chart-of-the-week-vanilla-could-soon-b...

It's also worth noting that R becomes much more pleasurable with the Tidyverse libraries. The pipe alone makes everything more readable.

I'm also coming from more of an office setting where everything is in Excel. I've used R to reorganize and tidy up Excel files a lot. Ggplot2 (part of the Tidyverse) is also fantastic for plotting, the grammar of graphics makes it really easy to make nice and slightly complex graphs. Compared to my Matplotlib experiences, it's night and day. Though I'd expect my experience with programming to be quite different from others' though, mainly because any code I write is basically an intermediary step before the output goes back in Excel.

That said, if anyone's interested in learning R from a beginner's level, I can recommend the book R for Data Science. It's available freely at http://r4ds.had.co.nz/ and the author also wrote ggplot2, RStudio, and several of the other Tidyverse libraries.

EDIT: I'm also currently writing my master's thesis in RMarkdown with the Thesisdown package. It's wonderful, it allows for using Latex without really knowing Latex which is great for us in business school.

Debt can be a strategic tool for a company. They want to maintain a certain debt-to-equity ratio as eliminating debt would probably be more expensive in the long run than maintaining that ratio. The ratio is, of course, not set in stone and is rather industry specific. The short, sweet, and overly simplified version is that debt provides tax shields and liquidity now. $100 now can be worth more than $120 in five years, so most companies are okay with a certain amount of debt.

Oh, I get what you mean now. A system like you show is essentially debits/credits, yes. For a lot of the smaller accounting systems, they actually print the GL in the format you show where negative numbers are equivalent to credit and positive to debit. As long as you use the same accounts it should be equivalent.

>p.s. Accounting standards vary. I work with startups in the US (little to no standards).

That's true. Here in Norway, all financial statements are publicly available regardless of company size, so they have to adhere to NGAAP (or IFRS if they're big enough).

>I would risk that most accountant don't know their debits and credits

I've worked in accounting and this is just not true. The ledger is stated in debit/credit and all transactions are done in debit/credit. Even if modern accounting software can automate some of it it still requires the accountant to verify the transaction. Hell, most accountants I know even draw up good ol' T-accounts on paper every once in a while to understand the larger and more complex transactions. I'd think you'd be hard pressed to find an accountant that doesn't know their debit and credit. An accountant that doesn't know their debits and credits is like a software developer that only knows Scratch.

Most commercial software doesn't hide debit/credit, and if it does, you should run away as fast as you can. How do you produce the required documentation for your auditor if the software hides debit and credit?

EDIT: To continue a bit.

>It used to be that companies have a handful of yearly profit/loss accounts and every year they "close the books" by transferring all balance to first profit/loss accounts then to equity. The financial year then starts with 0 profit an 0 loss. Afaik nobody does this anymore. Today you just keep all accounts running (don't "close them) and you generate repots by selecting a date range and let the computer calculate profits and losses for that range.

All companies still do this. It's part of the closing entries at the end of the FY. It's not just that the FY starts with 0 profit and 0 loss, but that that is the entire point of the financial statements. A company has three financial statements: the balance sheet, the income statement, and the cash flow statement. For this example, only the income statement and the balance sheet are relevant.

The balance sheet can be seen as a snapshot of a company. It shows what the company owns (assets) divided into short- and long-term assets, as well as how they paid for it (liabilities and equity). The concepts that it balances assets + liabilities + equity = 0 (debit is positive and credit is negative) is the foundation for the balance. The income statement shows a company's results over a given time frame, usually a year. You can consider the balance sheet permanent and the income statement temporary. Consider a company with the following results per 31.12:

    assets: $10.000 (d)
    liabilities: $7 500 (c)    
    equity: $500 (c)
    net revenue: $5.000 (c)
    costs: $3.000 (d)
    profit/loss: $2.000 (c)

It's clear that the entire ledger balances per 31.12 as the sum of debit is equal to the sum of credit accounts. We also see that the company owns $10.000 worth of assets which is mainly paid for through debt, and that they have a profit of $2.000 since the profit is credit. As the income statement is supposed to reflect the performance over a given period and the balance is supposed to balance, the solution is to transfer the profit to equity to record the profit in the (permanent) balance sheet and reset the (temporary) income statement so that they can record their next fiscal year. To do this they record debit profit/loss $2.000 and credit equity $2.000.

It's also not just a matter of recording the entry, which is fairly easy on modern accounting systems, but as it involves the distribution of profit (and touching equity for that matter) it typically needs the signature of the board.

I was an external auditor and when we did the closing entries for our clients we would require the CEO's or chairman's signature on a printed version of the final entries.

> I agree one should not write an accounting system without understanding the full details and history of the domain, but I disagree that 1400 year history proves anything.

Accounting isn't just a field that has had 1400 years to develop methods to solve the problem in the domain. It's a field that has had 1400 years to build regulations and exceptions. It's also a field which requires a lot of individual judgement. Take, for example, VAT. Here in Norway, the actual VAT law text is about 10% of the text in the handy VAT exceptions and judgement calls book we had in the office.

Writing accounting software that is actually useful for an extended period of time is incredibly difficult due to how accounting laws change all the time. Double the effort if you want the software to make tax returns as well. The company that developed the software we used had personal relations with almost all of their customers and would ask for feedback all the time. They probably shipped three versions during the busy season I was there.

I'm admittedly a fan of double-entry bookkeeping as it's conceptually easy (once learned) to map out complex transactions on a piece of paper.

99% of accounting is bog-standard, but that last 1% is complex as all hell. It can't really be ignored either as it can end up costing you or your client a significant amount of money, or even jail time.

I can't really state specifics, but I had a client whose bookkeeper failed to stay up to date on a very specific subset of a rather specific law which ended up costing the client millions in extra taxes. To put it in perspective, they suddenly had back-taxes for more than their company made in a year in revenues. This change was so specific that there wouldn't have been any consequences if they had done it a few weeks earlier. I'm rambling a bit here, but the point is, if you want to write a new type of accounting software, be really sure you know what you're doing.

I can only answer 1 from the perspective of a non-US, very junior, auditor with little experience, but I'll try.

I don't see how it handles complex transactions very well. A simple example would be VAT. Assume a 25% VAT (which is standard here). If you sell a product for $1000 cash in hand the relevant transaction would be:

C: Revenues $800

C: VAT payable $200

D: Cash $1000

An even better example would be payroll which can involve 5-15 different ledger accounts for a single employee.

The next bit can probably be solved through the notes part, but how would you attach invoices and documentation with Transity?

How do you do accounts payable or receivable with it? In addition to the balance sheet sum, the accounts pay/rec should also show the balance for each individual customer and supplier.

I'll try to cover the accounts payable/receivable parts at least. One of the major points of modern bookkeeping is accrual accounting, which means that we recognize economic transactions independently of the cash transaction. Since the economic transaction occurs before the cash transaction, we can't increase the cash balance so we use a short term receivables account. I realize that this explanation isn't great, so I'll try to provide an example.

Consider that you sell a product worth $1000 on the first of January and you issue an invoice to your customer that is due 30 days later (net 30 days). As of January first the economic transaction has taken place and needs to be recorded to stay consistent with the principles of accrual accounting. As we've provided the customer with a product but haven't received payment yet, we've in reality given the customer a short-term loan of $1000 which has to be recorded. Accounts payable is the overview of all of these "short-term loans" given to our customers. The ledger entry for this transaction would increase revenue and also increase this short term loan as shown below.

January 1:

c: revenue $1000 (income statement)

d: accounts receivable $1000 (balance sheet)

Whenever the customer pays for the product we have to update our balance to reflect that the loan has been paid and that the customer no longer has any outstanding debt to us. To do this we credit (decrease) accounts receivable by $1000 and debit (increase) cash on hand by $1000. Note that the second entry doesn't touch the income statement as the revenue has already been recognized.

January 30:

c: accounts receivable $1000

d: cash $1000

The final balance of our accounts at the end of the 30 day period will be:

revenues: $1000 (credit)

accounts receivable: 0

cash: $1000 (debit)

Accounts payable is the same thing, but in reverse. When purchasing from a supplier on netX terms, we've been given a short-term, interest free, loan which we have to record until we pay it. I hope this helps.

Pants falling down your ass isn't a protected class, so that's not really a fair argument.

> Only with the consent of the parents.

Why should the consent of the parents matter when designing the curriculum? If the parents in an area suddenly decides that they all believe the earth is flat, would you be okay with that being the science education?

Some people want to be a business partner more than an employee. Not that that's impossible as a software engineer, but it may be easier from a different starting point.

IANAL, but only consideration is a common law thing, and is not required in the majority of EU countries, provided that I recall correctly.

I'd guess that 80% of my Google Maps use is within one country, and that 99% is within three countries. I'd definitely download separate maps for each country to get better directions and maps.