I am the Accountancy King

[ciphergoth]

After years of incomprehensibility, a bit more scripting and the Mir accounts (which are stored as a Python script) suddenly start to sit up and beg, in a big way.

Now I can generate a huge pile of web pages from them, which show money moving in various directions, with a running total, like a bank statement.

I can finally justify the cheques I've been asking my flatmates to write...

Update: yes, I know how sad this makes me. If you had any idea how many incredibly painful and fraught hours me and purplerabbits had gone through trying to sort the accounts out, you'd be happy for me...

Comments

[lizw.livejournal.com]

I *am* happy for you, especially after trying to give a coherent account of my own finances to Dr D and ending up gibbering...

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

My immediate reaction to this post was "Cool! I really must think about learning Python"...

Then again, my job does involve an awful lot of book-keeping. Rather less than it should do, actually.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately it would be a bit hard for me to share the scripts I'm using since the generic stuff and the secret stuff is a bit mixed up. The best I could do would be to explain how it all works and the model, and then send you fragments of the script you can play with.

It would need a well-worked, ficticious example to be released. And I don't know how many situations besides flatshares it's really applicable to, since it tracks the debts of many parties, but not the *pairwise* debts; each party has one "owings" figure, and all "owings" sum to zero. This is an imperfect model for many things - you can't just point your debtors at your creditors and tell them to sort it out between themselves.

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the thought, but I suspected (correctly) that my version of Quicken does much the same job. Still, my having a knee-jerk reaction that Python-based accountancy scripts were cool and useful definitely says something about either me or my work...