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Double-entry bookkeeping as a directed graph

08 Apr 2024 My Journey into Accounting In the past couple of years, I’ve been working in billing and payments at Justworks. This experience introduced me to the world of bookkeeping and accounting in ways I didn’t expect: I took a course and read a textbook in accounting, adopted plain text accounting for my personal finances, and worked in a double-entry ledger system.

After using double-entry bookkeeping for a while in my personal finances and trying to come with a visualization for my ledgers, it finally clicked: we’re modeling money flow as a directed graph. It is the accountant’s job to decide how to group transactions and entries in a way that makes sense for the business as the bookkeeping system is flexible enough to accommodate different needs. Categories such as assets, liabilities, equity, income, and expenses are just groups of nodes in the graph and it is quite easy to understand whether credits or debits increase their balances.

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