Double-Entry Accounting

Discussions center on double-entry accounting principles, common misconceptions among programmers, explanations with examples, and links to resources like articles for computer scientists.

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Keywords

scientists.html IMO HN POV DE REA VERY kleppmann.com POSITIVE BOTH accounting debit entry ledger double credit balance balances transactions total

Sample Comments

fnordpiglet Feb 23, 2025 View on HN

Not when double entry accounting is involved.

rhizome31 Mar 26, 2016 View on HN

Sounds good, if only I understood double accounting :-)

epa Apr 29, 2016 View on HN

That's not really how accounting works

tarsinge Jun 6, 2019 View on HN

Slightly OT but if you want to get a basic understanding of double-entry accounting in a few minutes I found this article really great: https://martin.kleppmann.com/2011/03/07/accounting-for-compu... (discussed here https://news.ycombin

fortzi Nov 3, 2025 View on HN

The page explaining double entry accounting is worth an HN post on its own

snigacookie Jun 7, 2019 View on HN

What in the world are you talking about ?! Please consult a CPA and buy a financial accounting textbook. Like in physics every has an equal and opposite transaction.

ikeboy Mar 27, 2019 View on HN

That's not how accounting works.

jimnotgym Dec 15, 2019 View on HN

The other thing you can take from accountancy is double- entry...A toy example. Money was spent on x, so it gets charged to x account and removed from the bank. More correctly debit x-expense, credit bank. Credits are by convention negative numbers. Now no matter what happens your accounts always need to balance, ie the entire set of ledgers add up to zero. Audit checks are now trivial, if either your balances table or your transactions table do not sum to zero, alert somebody.It has b

CDokolas Oct 17, 2019 View on HN

Looks like they've discovered double-entry accounting......at last ;)

ciju Jun 21, 2025 View on HN

A quick introduction to double-entry account, from personal finance perspective.