Generating standard accounting reports from VF data
This is a trial balloon for the end of the https://valueflo.ws/introduction/accounting.html page.
If you want to count beans...
A standard General Ledger, Balance Sheet, and Income Statement can be generated automatically from ValueFlows data. No need to create a Chart of Accounts or post double-entries, those can all be created by a computer program on request.
Moreover, General Ledgers and accounting reports can be created automatically for each agent in an economic network using the VF vocabulary. These features are on the roadmap for the HoloREA project and possible another two or three projects now in the works.
This article describes how to generate General Ledgers etc from REA data using procedural code: Operation of a Relational Accounting System, Graham Gal and Bill McCarthy
Wim Laurier is working on how to do it declaratively. This paper gives an early view of how Wim and Satoshi Horiuchi intend to do it.
The difference between doing it procedurally and doing it declaratively:
- A procedural program defines a step-by-step method of getting the desired results.
- A declarative program describes the desired results and hands it to another program that can generate the desired results from your description. The person who desires the results writes much less code.