Double Entry

Terry Boldt tboldt@attglobal.net
Sun, 21 Jan 2001 20:23:37 -0500


Please ignore this if desired. I will say no more about it and I do not wish to
start a long discussion, just give you something to think about.

If the recent edition of "Industry Standard", Scott Cook, the co-founder of
Intuit, was interviewed. Quote:

"We work with customers the way way they work. For example, it turns out that
most businesses don't like double-entry accounting, but everybody was building
software that required listing debits and credits."

You may not agree with Scott, but its pretty hard to argue with the fact that
QuickBooks is by far the most used financial s/w. They are doing a lot of
things right, the way people want to do it.

I'm saying this because you might want to stop trying to impress people with
gnucash as double entry book-keeping s/w. First it's not, and second they don't
like double entry. I say it's not, because it is single entry, double post. The
user enters all figures just once, then gnucash copies that entry to
wherever it is supposed to go, entry mistakes and all. Double entry book keeping
s/w is an oxymoron no matter who writes it.

Try to impress people with the ease of use, the better GUI, the robustness, the
important aspects of open source, the large and active developer community, the
great aspects of feedback to that community,  etc., but you might want to listen
to Scott Cook and de-emphasize the double post aspects.
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