Accounting for Programmers

This is an extended series of posts to introduce the concepts of accounting to programmers. It is born of my own exploration into the subject and I have started writing in 2016. It take a somewhat different approach to most books in that we will be looking at accounting from the point of view of a programmer, me!

There two goals, in the first part I am exploring the nature of double entry book keeping with the directed graph approach and how accounting emerges from this. There is a lot of explanation and exploration as to the nature of accounting records and why the credit/debit system is isomorphic with positive and negative balances.

If you want to just read one thing then try the explanation of an orange trading business.

Demo

Business with a liability

flowchart LR classDef classAssets fill:#CDA; classDef classBusiness fill:#FFFFDE; classDef classEquity fill:#EEB,stroke-width:4px; classDef classExpense fill:#FCC,stroke-width:4px; classDef classIncome fill:#BCE,stroke-width:4px; classDef classInvestor fill:#ECECFF,stroke-width:4px; classDef classLiabilities fill:#DDD; E([Equity Input **£-25**]) class E classEquity; subgraph Internal style Internal fill:#EEE direction LR B([Cash Assets **£62.50**]) class B classAssets; F([Farmer **£-25**]) class F classLiabilities; end S([Sales **£-37.50**]) class S classIncome; P([Purchases **£25**]) class P classExpense; E -- £25 --> B S -- £37.50 --> B F -- £25 --> P

The use of computers allows a freedom to present information in different ways to those bound by clay or paper. For instance exact conventions become unimportant as you can display data in any way you like. A good example of this is an early Ada computer that stored programs as abstract syntax trees and then presented to the programmer in their preferred format. This is an alternative approach to formatting all the code in the same the Black does with Python.

It is currently a work in progress so see the overall plan.

Current Structure

Current plan of work

Sort current structiure
Generate PDF’s and epub from it
Complete historical accounting
Complete why Pacioli was wrong and why it does not matter
Complete Balance sheet presentation
Do profit and loss calculations and presentation
Do profit and lost calculation

Future subjects

End of period accounts
Expand slides to include notes on banks
- Safety deposit
- Ponzi
- Central bank
Hierachical accounts
- input and output -VAT
Government tax collection
Rework Accounting conventions
Double entry requires separate input and output accounts
Account types - correspondence of Personal real and nominal

Mindmap

mindmap afp((accounting for programmers)) Accounting Records historical context Summerian Uruk Chinese? Indian Single Entry and Double entry accounting The PiggyBank Entity Counting M))Movements(( Balance to Zero Credit and debits Negative numbers Balance sheet Profit and loss Banking Time series data Traditional Account topics VAT Government tax collection Division of labour Petty cash accounting The trial balance (and the accounting equation) Reporting for Taxes Reporting for management info Stock Invoicing Plain Text accounting Free and commercial software packages

2025

2025-01-06 References
2025-01-05
2025-01-05 Accounting Records
2025-01-02 Accounting tricks
2025-01-01 Accounting movements

2024

2024-12-29 British and American terminology
2024-12-28 Balances, credits and debits
2024-12-28 Single and Double Entry bookkeeping
2024-12-28 Time series and accounts
2024-12-27 Historic accounting records
2024-12-26 Counting your stuff
2024-12-18 Free and commercial accounting software packages
2024-11-22 Plain text accounting