The Gnucash database?

[Mark H. Wood]

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On Tue, 27 Jul 2004, blfs wrote:
> OK, I have spent some time with Gnucash.  It appears
> to me that all transactions are generated from the GL.

I'm not sure what you mean here.  When I write a check, I enter it in the
checking account register.  When I deposit to savings, I enter it in the
savings register.  It all magically appears on the general ledger (which
I've heard of, but never figured out what it's for).  You can, it would
seem, enter everything in the GL and the transactions will also appear in
the appropriate account registers.  Apparently you can work whichever way
you prefer.

> If this be true, this is not natural because in the real world
> the GL is the last step and not the first.  One thing that
> a financial program needs to do is to try to imitate that
> which was done by hand for thousands of years.

Well, mechanical methods should imitate the *useful* properties of the
manual methods they replace.  I have no use for a feature of an accounting
program that applies ink stains to my fingertips or misfiles books.  A
financial program should be like a paper system in all the senses for
which we like paper, and different in all the senses for which we dislike
paper (assuming we see a better way).

> Before computers, people did not make GL entrys and
> then from there make checks invoices etc etc.
>
> This would have been completely unworkable.
>
> If it is completely unworkable by hand it cannot be a
> good solution by computer.

I beg to differ.  It would, for example, be insane to just pile all your
accounts together intermixed on one page and then try to ignore the ones
you're not looking at right this moment.  The computer can do that with
ease, and it is arguable that that is the proper way to do it:  all
transactions go in a single store and are then selected by account title
when you want to look at one account's register.

One reason we have computers is that they are more mutable than paper, in
very useful ways, and computerizing a process opens up new ways of doing
things that may be better than what we had before.  We can still make the
data *look* as they did in the manual process, whether they are stored
that way or not.  You can run a relational database, for example, on
paper, but who would want to? yet it's a very useful thing when we have a
computer to do the nasty fiddly bits for us.

I think you need to explore a bit more.

- -- 
Mark H. Wood, radical centrist     OpenPGP ID 876A8B75     mhwood at ameritech.net
No amount of clipart will save dull writing or an uninteresting topic.
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