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I would like to strongly second your recommendations regarding accounting. Double entry accounting is the root of all finance. If you understand it well enough
by gen220 6y ago
I would like to strongly second your recommendations regarding accounting. Double entry accounting is the root of all finance. If you understand it well enough to keep accurate accounts of your personal finances (credit cards, 401k, salary, pre/post-tax expenses, etc), you understand it well enough to fumble through a financial statement. I’d plug GNU Ledger, but really any double entry accounting software is good to get started.
- EvanAnderson 6y agoCame here to say this, too. I think at least a 100-level knowledge of account is beneficial to nearly every developer. Bookkeeping is, arguably, one of the oldest and longest-practiced "data processing" disciplines. It seems arbitrary and somewhat old-fashioned until you grok the reasoning and history behind it (double-entry sourced from summaries of various different "journals" to facilitate separation of duties, closing periods and rolling-up detail entries into totals because human computational power is limited, an equation that balances implicitly when there aren't entry errors, etc.) From a personal finance perspective I think everyone should get some training in account but, sadly, that's probably way too optimistic of an attitude.
- znpy 6y agoWhat's the opinion about gnucash?
- gen220 6y agoBig caveat that I’ve never seriously tried using it, but my perspective is that GNUCash and GNU Ledger have different target audiences. The way I think of it is (Cash is to LibreOffice) as (Ledger is to some combination of Vim and SQLite). Cash aims to replace non-free accounting software, Ledger is both a file format and a general purpose tool for parsing and transforming that file format, that is designed for accounting but can be used to drive a wide variety of applications.