Re: [SQL-Ledger-users] OT: Web-based Checking Software

[John O. <jo...@ca...>]

My name is John and I am an accountant. (sounds like Alcoholics Anonymous)

Ron is correct in that older text based accounting packages used, reversing
of incorrect entries, instead of amending them, however, there are about
three or four commercially available packages, which seamlessly amend these
erroneous ones, and replace them with the correct one. It helps the
readability of a transaction listing, not to have to manually stroke off
contra entries.
What the better ones do, is to take a copy of the entry being chanegd and
dump it into another file to allow the year end auditors to see the
transactions which were changed, by whom and when. This makes two reports
available, one for the user, and one for the auditors.


John Osborne


----- Original Message -----
From: Ron Pero <rp...@bo...>
To: <sql...@li...>
Sent: Monday, May 07, 2001 1:33 AM
Subject: Re: [SQL-Ledger-users] OT: Web-based Checking Software


> I could be wrong about this -- I'm not an accountant and do not use
> accounting software much -- but is it not an important principle that once
> you make an entry in a computerized accounting system, you do not allow it
> to be changed. If you want to cancel a previous entry, that cancellation
is
> a new entry that just reverses the previous entry. And if you made a
> mistake in a previous entry, you do not go back and change that entry, but
> instead you create new entries that make the correction. If this is true,
> then there is no consideration of changing an old entry and then
> recalculating the balance. The balance will always be up-to-date.
>
> Ron
>
>  At 04:17 PM 05/05/01 -0500, you wrote:
> >  Linas,
> >  Rather than keep a running total on a per-transaction basis, why not
> >keep a daily balance.  Then if you change a transaction 2 months ago,
> >you've got to apply one change to 60 entries and the change is always
> >the same (+/- X).  A single query can do that lickity-split.
> >  Then when you display, you calculate the running total from the
> >starting balance of the first day displayed, allowing you to process
> >(hopefully) very few transactions.  Alternately the running total could
> >be based on some arbitrary number of transactions (say the balance every
> >hundredth transaction to avoid problems with high-volumes of
> >transactions (e.g. a video store or a fast-food resteraunt that does
> >1000+ transactions/day).
> >  Just a thought
> >
> >Linas Vepstas wrote:
> >>
> >[...]
> >> Well, its 'almost' usable, except for one interesting technical problem
> >> I'd like to tell you about.  GnuCash likes to display accounts in a
> >> 'checkbook register style': that means that there is a running balance
> >> displayed in one of the columns (far right column).
> >>
> >> Say one has a millions transactions in the database. Clearly its insane
> >> to fetch all of them to compute a running balance.  We could store a
> >> running balance with each transaction, but this has a nasty update
> >> semantic: changing one transaction would require updates to hundreds
> >> or thousands of others that occur at a later date.  We talked about
> >> storing 'balance checkpoints' to solve that problem.  But this
> >> introduces another problem: I would need to query a contiguous set of
> >> transactions between checkpoints.  At this point, the sql queries start
> >> getting complex, there's a lot of traffic to the database, and yuck,
> >> so we left it to ferment a bit more.    If you are willing to ignore
> >> the running balance column, then I think the multi-user mode is not far
> >> off.  (there's some minor misc stuff that needs to be brushed up, I
> >> forget what).
> >>
> >[...]
> >
> >--
> >--------------------------------------------------------
> >Donald L. Greer, Jr                  dg...@Au...
> >System Administrator                 Voice: 512-835-8005
> >AustinTX.COM                    http://www.AustinTX.COM/
> >  All opinions are my own.  Flame me directly.
> >
> >"I don't necessarily believe software should be free...
> >but if you pay for it, it should work!" -- Me
> >
>
>