At audit time the world of “holy shit what were these people thinking?” will be colossal, because we do not get to pretend that a system is a black box at audit time.
If those records don’t make sense to an accounting professional, then they’re fucked up, and that’s all she wrote. The world of audit has seen a million shysters try to falsify their books under the guise of alternative methods, and they are not interested in some self-serving hubris from programmers about re-inventing their own profession.
So this guide isn’t just philosophically off beam. It could get someone fired or sued.
Yeah I've worked on so many systems that dealt with money. Telephone invoicing, business accounting, ticket sales, etc.
One of the businesses I worked for did online invoicing and they initially started off without double ledger accounting. I was employee 30 or so and I kept repeating "we need double ledger accounting" every month or so. Nobody really listened to me (to be fair I was young, but this was after the telephone invoicing job) until the cracks started to form. It took them years to transition to a new system. Do not re-invent accounting with your own terms. International commerce runs on it and it has figured out a lot of the edge cases.
Accounting professionals can only ever look at user interfaces. If there is a suspicion of fraud then a court can ask expert witnesses to look into the software itself.
The law does put some constraints on what accounting software must and must not allow users to do (e.g change data without leaving a trace).
But I'm not aware of any specific legal requirements regarding data representation or mandating the use of specific algorithms where mathematically equivalent ones exist.
If those records don’t make sense to an accounting professional, then they’re fucked up, and that’s all she wrote. The world of audit has seen a million shysters try to falsify their books under the guise of alternative methods, and they are not interested in some self-serving hubris from programmers about re-inventing their own profession.
So this guide isn’t just philosophically off beam. It could get someone fired or sued.
Probably not prosecuted though. Probably.