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Accounting for developers part III – building a lending marketplace

152 points by mattmcf 4y ago

cosmiccatnap 4y ago
Would love to see development for accountants so everytime marketing needs a new tool integrated to run a report they can see the time it takes to provision, implement, test, release, and then audit it.
GGO 4y ago
Modern Treasury blogs are always full of gold nuggets. Is there RSS feed for this?
- EliasLittle 4y ago
  yep! https://www.moderntreasury.com/journal/rss.xml https://www.moderntreasury.com/journal/rss.xml You can also get automatic emails
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
danielrhodes 4y ago
Having contributed to a project that needed to apply these principles in a previous role, it can’t be understated how important it is to understand these concepts. One thing I found interesting though is that one feature of double entry accounting is creating a paper trail where some lost data can be reconstructed if necessary with redundancies. For example if you lose the physical pages detailing a transaction, you can figure out what happened based on data contained in another page. A problem we ran into was how to reconcile that methodology with how this would be solved in code (e.g. DB backups).
- DimitriPetrova 4y ago
  You should take a look at SAP's source code
skipants 4y ago
I still don't understand why they encourage double-entry accounting for tech. In my experience entries like: | amount | payer_id | payee_id | | 100 | 1 | 2 | are more than sufficient. He uses Square, Uber, and Airbnb as examples in https://www.moderntreasury.com/journal/accounting-for-developers-part-i https://www.moderntreasury.com/journal/accounting-for-develo... but, as far as I can tell, only Square uses double-entry. Double entry accounting was for when people were hand-writing a ledger and it helped avoid mistakes. It makes no sense in code and it just makes your DB queries more complicated.
- thfuran 4y ago
  Isn't your example double entry? It shows both accounts involved in the transaction and the direction of the transaction.
  - skipants 4y ago
    Double-entry is recording the credits and debits in a column and each account change happens on a row. So if I change the ledger in my parent comment to double entry it would look like: | account_id | credit_amount | debit_amount | | 1 | 0 | 100 | | 2 | 100 | 0 |
- 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
  what do you mean dont use double entry and use a DB query instead? if your customer is paying you, how will you record that transaction?
- zie 4y ago
  What happens if you need to split that $100 from payer_id 1 into 2 payer_id 2's? I.e. that $100 is actually: $99 from 1 to 2 and $1(let's say in taxes) to payer_id 3. The easy answer is, make it 2 transaction, $99 to 2 and $1 to 3, but then you can't tell that the $1 in taxes is from the $99 transaction. That leads to headaches when you need to balance your taxes.
  - skipants 4y ago

152 points by mattmcf 4y ago

Would love to see development for accountants so everytime marketing needs a new tool integrated to run a report they can see the time it takes to provision, implement, test, release, and then audit it.

GGO 4y ago

Modern Treasury blogs are always full of gold nuggets. Is there RSS feed for this?

EliasLittle 4y ago
yep! https://www.moderntreasury.com/journal/rss.xml https://www.moderntreasury.com/journal/rss.xml You can also get automatic emails

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

danielrhodes 4y ago

Having contributed to a project that needed to apply these principles in a previous role, it can’t be understated how important it is to understand these concepts. One thing I found interesting though is that one feature of double entry accounting is creating a paper trail where some lost data can be reconstructed if necessary with redundancies. For example if you lose the physical pages detailing a transaction, you can figure out what happened based on data contained in another page. A problem we ran into was how to reconcile that methodology with how this would be solved in code (e.g. DB backups).

DimitriPetrova 4y ago
You should take a look at SAP's source code

skipants 4y ago

I still don't understand why they encourage double-entry accounting for tech. In my experience entries like: | amount | payer_id | payee_id | | 100 | 1 | 2 | are more than sufficient. He uses Square, Uber, and Airbnb as examples in https://www.moderntreasury.com/journal/accounting-for-developers-part-i https://www.moderntreasury.com/journal/accounting-for-develo... but, as far as I can tell, only Square uses double-entry. Double entry accounting was for when people were hand-writing a ledger and it helped avoid mistakes. It makes no sense in code and it just makes your DB queries more complicated.

thfuran 4y ago
Isn't your example double entry? It shows both accounts involved in the transaction and the direction of the transaction.
- skipants 4y ago
  Double-entry is recording the credits and debits in a column and each account change happens on a row. So if I change the ledger in my parent comment to double entry it would look like: | account_id | credit_amount | debit_amount | | 1 | 0 | 100 | | 2 | 100 | 0 |
2Gkashmiri 4y ago
what do you mean dont use double entry and use a DB query instead? if your customer is paying you, how will you record that transaction?
zie 4y ago
What happens if you need to split that $100 from payer_id 1 into 2 payer_id 2's? I.e. that $100 is actually: $99 from 1 to 2 and $1(let's say in taxes) to payer_id 3. The easy answer is, make it 2 transaction, $99 to 2 and $1 to 3, but then you can't tell that the $1 in taxes is from the $99 transaction. That leads to headaches when you need to balance your taxes.
- skipants 4y ago