It’s “the most influential work in the history of capitalism”. We “may not have had the Industrial Revolution without it&rdquo

An Engineer's Guide to Double-Entry Bookkeeping

submited by
Style Pass
2024-11-05 04:30:02

It’s “the most influential work in the history of capitalism”. We “may not have had the Industrial Revolution without it”. It’s kind of a big deal.

But, especially if you’re a technical founder, you might not actually understand it. You’re not alone: I conducted a survey of early-stage founders at our co-working space in Cambridge, with companies from 2 to 16 people in size. About 75% of founders said they didn’t understand bookkeeping! It seems that many founders are just mashing buttons in Quickbooks and hoping for the best.

But we’re hackers – we can do better than that! If you can write code, you can understand double-entry bookkeeping. And we’re going to prove it, by building an accounting app from scratch. All you need is a little bit of Python.

Let’s say my startup has $2,000 in the bank. I then spend $1,500 of that on a laptop. If I was just looking at the money in my bank account, I’d think that money just disappeared. But it didn’t disappear – it turned into a laptop!

Leave a Comment