[ale] GnuCash [OT]

Lightner, Jeff JLightner at water.com
Wed Aug 1 09:44:37 EDT 2012


Each to his own.   To me basic accounting made perfect sense.

Now when you get into Tax accounting and more esoteric things it isn't so much about sense as about "rules" (mostly Government regulations).

Then again to me some "rules" make sense.  I remember the fight some of the larger IT companies (including one I was working at) were putting up a few years back after the 2001 accounting meltdowns against having to make more reasonable liability entries (and therefore associated expenses) for changing values of stock options.    To me the new rules (if not the exact formulas) made perfect sense.   Having given someone a stock option for $12 for a stock that had since become worth $200 but only keeping a $12 liability on the books made no sense at all.    Multiply that times the thousands of stock options given by such companies and you can see the problem.

On the other hand Sarbanes-Oxley was overkill.   Implying that the way your Sysadmin slices up his disks somehow has a DIRECT bearing on stock value is just plain stupid.   I didn't know how good I'd had it with S-OX though.  Later after I went to work for a Pharmaceutical and had to do FDA Validation though I missed the simplicity of S-OX.

By the way I wasn't implying you weren't intelligent - just relating an experience I had early on.    I've found that different minds focus on different things.   I once knew a woman who most folks thought to be rather dumb.    We once had a conversation about fashion and I realized that in fact she knew quite a great deal - it was simply in an area that didn't really interest me.





-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of JD
Sent: Wednesday, August 01, 2012 9:18 AM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] GnuCash [OT]

On 08/01/2012 08:30 AM, Lightner, Jeff wrote:
> it.   The funny thing is that although it apparently takes intelligence to
> "get" accounting is that at the same time accounting becomes very
> routine and boring to those of us who do "get" it which is why I made
> the move into IT long ago.

When I was forced to deal with accounting, I found that it didn't make sense - the rules seemed arbitrary to me and simply needed to be memorized since a general rule wouldn't work 100%. There wasn't any logic.  I still feel that way.

My companies pay an accountant and I keep the unofficial company records inside Quicken (running under WINE).  I can track a check book register without issues and assign categories too. ;) The doubt entry stuff seemed like 2x more work than is necessary for a small business.

I'm certain this shows my ignorance. That's fine. We can't know and understand everything.

I've tried to get our accountants to encrypt emails to us. They don't "get it"
either.  We always send them encrypted data. I'm fairly certain our data is not secure on their computer systems, but that is probably an issue at all but the largest accounting companies.

I'm a former rocket scientist, BTW.
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