[GNC] Delete, copy and paste to fix mistakes?

[Wu Ming]

Hello,

I am not an accountant. Nevertheless was recently asked to administer a family micro business.

With few tens of customers and a handful of transactions a year for each, volume doesn’t seem large. I can possibly manage with a spreadsheet. 

The newly hired, first employee is an unknown. There’s no transactions history to look at. 

One concern is the learning process. On a text document or spreadsheet I am used to fix mistakes by deleting what is wrong. And start over with ample copy and paste to reuse. On a spreadsheet also everything is, mostly, under sight. I can literally use the zoom in and out function.

I have the idea of accounting books being this sacred repository carved in stone. Where only adding transactions is allowed. What is the reality for who uses GNU Cash?

Another concern is of reproducibility. With a text file it is easy to diff and find what changed and by who. And merge or roll back version. With a database is not. Data model is likely relational, db file is binary so it requires another tool to interact with, backup up as well and concurrent use requires checks and locks. I have read GNU Cash uses SQLlite. How do you deal with versioning / backups and uncoordinated, albeit rare, access from few users?

On the subject I was also toying with the idea to implement something with GNU Recutils. Relational, plain text file based data store. But I don’t think have the skills or time for it. 

I helped at developing web applications for medium sized businesses. Have some experience of databases and UNIX. Not with accounting on a shoestring though. 

Thanks for sharing.