Fri 16 Jun 2006
Currently I am working on a Javascript packacge for doing double entry book-keeping . Inspired by TiddlyWiki, I figured it should be pretty easy to write one. Well its quite tricky. Some problems I've run into so far are things like this: In javascript sometimes when you say a=1; b=1; c=a+b; you may end up with c being equal to "11" or to "2". There are ways around it of course but imagine trying to hunt down a bug like that.
Then of course it would be helpful if I really understood accounting. Credit – Debit? It is hard to keep the two straight. As far as I can tell a credit is money being received and a debit is money being spent. Of course I've read a couple books and can fake my way through using a spreadsheet.
I will probably release a sneak peek at the alpha version soon. Just so that other people can see what I have going on. I plan on having a CPA look it over before I release the beta.
One of the things that I pan to have in the app will be CSV. Right now all the data is stored as CSV. I have it writing to separate files right now. Soon I will try to integrate the TiddlyWiki idea into it. That is have it save the data within the application file its self. But I will still stick with the CSV idea. I think its important that the data be easily exportable to a spreadsheet.
June 26th, 2006 at 7:13 am
You should have a look at GnuCash – it implements double-entry bookkeeping with a nice, clean interface.
July 3rd, 2006 at 4:44 pm
I have used GnuCash in the past and it is really great.
This one however is written in JavaScript and will run on any browser that can do JS. So IE | Mozilla/Firefox | Safari | Konqueror.
That means that I can just carry a thumbdrive with the .html file and work on my books anywhere.