> I disagree with this. This might be fair and technically correct on paper, but we don't use paper anymore. here's a simple case you may have encountered your

> I disagree with this. This might be fair and technically correct on paper, but we don't use paper anymore. here's a simple case you may have encountered yourself: you order a shopping cart of a fair amount of stuff (not even that much) from Amazon, and click purchase. Later you're wondering about an Amazon charge on your credit card so you look in your emails from Amazon and you log into your account on Amazon, and you can't match the charges on your card with any of your shopping transactions with Amazon, the numbers bear no resemblance to one another. Amazon is not bookkeeping in a way that's at all useful to you. Since you are the consumer of the data, they're not fulfilling their accounting obligation which is clear presentation of the record. I have no doubt that their calculations are correct, but just as computers can free us from the burden of adding up numbers correctly, computers can also do other tasks we find burdensome, like double entry bookkeeping. When as a programmer I used to resist writing code that seemed inelegant, my old boss used to remind me that the computer was the drudge, a mere servant to the whims of the various humans using it. If Amazon wants to rejigger your shopping carts with respect to backorders and shipping, they could easily do it in a way that allowed you to reconcile your statements simply.