I mean, this is kind of how accounting does work. To a basic approximation a reconciliation is a line by line review of each of the flows, and an audit is "blow away the accounts and recreate them" and both happen all the time.
Re:FDIC Takes over Silicon Valley Bank
by melenaboija on Friday March 10, 2023 @06:10PM
(#35102589)
> I think if a programmer were designing accounting, they'd put the flows in the database, and build views out of that. They might materialize the views for performance reasons, but they'd treat those views as suspect and the first response to any bug would be "blow away the accounts and recreate them".
That is actually how it works, if you don't have "flows" you don't have accounting postings and if you have to fix an error you redo the postings from the flows. In this sense I would say that the "flows" are the source of truth.
Re:FDIC Takes over Silicon Valley Bank
by jkhdigital on Friday March 10, 2023 @10:56PM
(#35105108)
Right. The only actual raw data is transactions. Account balances are just filtered rollups. Double entry bookkeeping is just how you manually accumulate a set of account balances from transaction data, and a set of conventions for consistently labeling and grouping the transaction sources and destinations.
You couldn't do bookkeping with actual books that way, and historically this way makes sense. Nor is it likely that the accountants are going to rethink their field from the ground up for the convenience of programmers.