If those records don’t make sense to an accounting professional, then they’re fucked up, and that’s all she wrote. The world of audit has seen a million shysters try to falsify their books under the guise of alternative methods, and they are not interested in some self-serving hubris from programmers about re-inventing their own profession.

So this guide isn’t just philosophically off beam. It could get someone fired or sued.

Probably not prosecuted though. Probably.

One of the businesses I worked for did online invoicing and they initially started off without double ledger accounting. I was employee 30 or so and I kept repeating "we need double ledger accounting" every month or so. Nobody really listened to me (to be fair I was young, but this was after the telephone invoicing job) until the cracks started to form. It took them years to transition to a new system. Do not re-invent accounting with your own terms. International commerce runs on it and it has figured out a lot of the edge cases.

The law does put some constraints on what accounting software must and must not allow users to do (e.g change data without leaving a trace).

But I'm not aware of any specific legal requirements regarding data representation or mandating the use of specific algorithms where mathematically equivalent ones exist.