4 ms·

I had a similar experience recently having GPT-4 teach me double entry bookkeeping for a project I am ramping up on. I understood it in a vague sense from some

I had a similar experience recently having GPT-4 teach me double entry bookkeeping for a project I am ramping up on. I understood it in a vague sense from some Google, but wouldn’t be able to talk to a room full of accountants in an intelligent way. I was feeling like I needed to read a book or take a class, but tried using GPT-4 as an interactive tutor instead. After about an hour of delving into details, examples, history and analogies, I get it on a deep level that would have normally taken many days to develop. Most of the material I found before took an approach of “just memorize this” while I was able to get more parsimonious core concepts that were hidden behind 500 years of practice.

quonn 4y ago
Teach yourself French in 10 days. It includes 3 audio books which make it really easy, too.
Animats 4y ago
That's a good case. There's a huge amount of material available on double-entry bookkeeping, and there's a consensus on how it works. So a LLM can handle that.
drc500free 4y ago
That's great! I didn't really grok accrual accounting until I realized that non cash "accounts" are explanations for why there is extra cash or missing cash. When I stopped thinking about an asset as "a truck" and started thinking of it as "an explanation that cash is missing because we bought a truck" it all clicked. The "asset account" is the negative space around the asset, so that it can be matched up later with the cash that is generated by using up the asset. Before that I thought of assets and revenues as good, and liabilities and expenses as bad. I couldn't make sense of why an asset turns into a liability instead of into a revenue. It's similar to learning intro physics and trying to understand how anything moves if every force generates an opposite force.

4 ms·

I had a similar experience recently having GPT-4 teach me double entry bookkeeping for a project I am ramping up on. I understood it in a vague sense from some

by dougmwne 4y ago

quonn 4y ago
Teach yourself French in 10 days. It includes 3 audio books which make it really easy, too.
Animats 4y ago
That's a good case. There's a huge amount of material available on double-entry bookkeeping, and there's a consensus on how it works. So a LLM can handle that.
drc500free 4y ago
That's great! I didn't really grok accrual accounting until I realized that non cash "accounts" are explanations for why there is extra cash or missing cash. When I stopped thinking about an asset as "a truck" and started thinking of it as "an explanation that cash is missing because we bought a truck" it all clicked. The "asset account" is the negative space around the asset, so that it can be matched up later with the cash that is generated by using up the asset. Before that I thought of assets and revenues as good, and liabilities and expenses as bad. I couldn't make sense of why an asset turns into a liability instead of into a revenue. It's similar to learning intro physics and trying to understand how anything moves if every force generates an opposite force.