The crypto model of single entries with "from" and "to" field works well for transactions. For example you move $100 from checking to savings account, something like the following will capture it perfectly.
But the main reason why we need double entry accounting is that not all accounting entries are transfers. For example, is we are logging a sales, cash increases by $100, and revenue increases by $100. What's the "from" here? Revenue isn't an account where account is taken from, it is the "source" of the cash increase. So something like the following doesn't capture the true semantics of the transaction.
- Depreciation: Nothing moves. You're recognizing that a truck is worth less than before and that this consumed value is an expense.
- Accruals: Recording revenue you earned but haven't been paid for yet. No cash moved anywhere.
The limitation of ledgers with "from" and "to" is that it assumes conservation of value (something moves from A to B). But accounting tracks value creation, destruction, and transformation, not just movement. Double-entry handles these without forcing a transfer metaphor onto non-transfer events.
But you don't need double entry to register increases or decreases of value; you could as well just use single-entry accounting and add or remove money from a single account, using transactions that are not transfers.
In the past this was problematic because you missed error-checking by redundance, but nowadays you can trust a computer to do all the checking with database transactions (which are more complex checks than double entry, though they don't need to be exposed into the business domain). Any tracking that you'd want to do with double-entry accounting could be done by creating single-entry accounts with similar meaning, and registering each transaction once, if you know that you can trust the transaction to be recorded correctly.
I think this depends on what you consider to be the fundamental trait of double-entry accounting: the error-checking or the explanatory power.
It is true that by enforcing that value movement have both a source and a target, we make it possible to add a useful checksum to the system. But I believe this is a side benefit to the more fundamental trait of requiring all value flow to record both sides, in order to capture the cause for each effect.
I agree with your general perspective though: technology has afforded us new and different tools, and thus we should be open to new data models for accounting. I don't agree with other commenters that we should tread lightly in trying to decipher another field, nor do I agree with the view that the field of Accounting would have found a better way by now if there were one. Accountants are rarely, if ever, experts in CS or software engineering; likewise software developers rarely have depth in accounting.
Source: just my opinions. I've been running an accounting software startup for 5 years.
You should stop presuming that you know more about what’s needed than an entire field of business practice and study. There is actual theory behind accounting. Accountants understand that there can be different views on the same underlying data, and the system they continue to choose to use has a lot of benefits. You seem to be really stuck on the idea that the mental model accounting as a profession finds useful doesn’t seem useful to you. But it doesn’t need to make sense to you.
I'm not presuming I know anything about accounting. I know a great deal about data recording and management though, and my analysis is done from that perspective.
I explicitly recognized that the practice of accounting as a discipline keeps using traditional concepts that are culturally adequate for its purpose. What my posts are pointing out is that the original reason for double-entry records, which was having redundant data checks, is no longer a technical need in order to guarantee consistency because computers are already doing it automatically. From the pure data management perspective I'm analysing, that's undeniable.
The most obvious consequence of this analysis is that traditional bookkeeping is no longer the only viable way of traking accountability; new tools open the possibility of exploring alternative methods.
Compare it to music notation; people keep proposing new ways to write music scores, some of them computer assisted; and though none of them is going to replace the traditional way any time soon, there are places where alternative methods may prove useful; such as guitar tablature, or piano-roll sheets for digital samplers. The same could be true for accounting (and in fact some people in this thread have pointed out at different ways to build accounting software such as the
Resources, Events, Agents model.)
```json { "from": "Checking", "to": "Savings", "amount": 100 } ```
This is basically what a crypto ledger does.
But the main reason why we need double entry accounting is that not all accounting entries are transfers. For example, is we are logging a sales, cash increases by $100, and revenue increases by $100. What's the "from" here? Revenue isn't an account where account is taken from, it is the "source" of the cash increase. So something like the following doesn't capture the true semantics of the transaction.
```json { "from": "Revenue", "to": "Cash", "amount": 100 } ```
Instead, in accounting, the above transaction is captured as the following.
```json { "transaction": "Sale", "entries": [ { "account": "Cash", "debit": 100, "credit": null }, { "account": "Revenue", "debit": null, "credit": 100 } ] } ```
It gets worse with other entries like:
- Depreciation: Nothing moves. You're recognizing that a truck is worth less than before and that this consumed value is an expense. - Accruals: Recording revenue you earned but haven't been paid for yet. No cash moved anywhere.
The limitation of ledgers with "from" and "to" is that it assumes conservation of value (something moves from A to B). But accounting tracks value creation, destruction, and transformation, not just movement. Double-entry handles these without forcing a transfer metaphor onto non-transfer events.