poorloan

Poorloan

Poorloan is something to play with friends. We love borrowing money from friends, and forgetting them after spending. But our friends are nice, we should not betray them, and should mark all of your credit on the wall.

All of us are poor, and we love this poor program. The main goal is to have every transaction recorded, with simple currency conversion.

Setup

Nothing else but an editor is required for accounting, even without any accounting experience. Poorloan is just a package providing validation on book and computing liabilities.

The book will be separated into files. A .bk file is the main file containing book options and all basic information of accounts. A lot of .ent files do the accounting, containing only entries related to the particular account.

Book Options

Currency Setting

currencies {string} ...

{} blocks refer to variables here and below, and the variable type is specified; otherwise the word is of keywords. Many {string} blocks can be appended behind. string accepts no blank characters (spaces or tabs), due to blank characters are separators of blocks.

Only the last one currencies command is valid in the book.

Account Setting

account {string} {string}/{quoted string}

Each account command opens a new account. The first string refers to the unique name of the account, followed by the filename which is the .ent file associated with the account. A string quoted with "" allows the filename containing spaces (maybe buggy if too complicated).

Entries

Entries are simple and we do double-entry accounting between accounts.

{uuid} credit/debit {Decimal} {string} [ @/= {Decimal} {string} ]
  ID                  Amount  Currency         Amount  Currency

Any Currency string blocks must be a string registered with currencies command in .bk file. ID in uuid form xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx is unique for every transaction. In double-entry accounting, all entries of a single ID must be a zero sum when calculating the amount (with sign, debit is positive and credit negative). The first Amount is the actual transaction amount, of the first Currency. [] blocks are optional. Here the optional block is used to do currency conversion while calculating account liabilities.

The concept here is that we do not returning the money back, instead we credit for filling debt. One holds negative liabilities should have the responsibility to credit money to others. In this accounting program, debit means the holder of this account receives money, while credit means sending. The one who receives money gets negative liabilities.

Considering human-readability, we use credit or debit to record the entry instead of simple plus/minus sign. Therefore, Amount must be a positive number, while the program does not check due to flexibility. Not using plus/minus sign also give convenience on writing currency conversion information.

Currency Conversion

Currency conversion use two operator: @ and =, referring to "convert at price" and "convert to amount". For example,

10 USD @ 7 CNY

tells the program to write 70 CNY to the account liabilities, while

10 USD = 70 CNY

does the same. It is easy to receive money then, using @, automatically get the liability of another currency with the current exchange rate; as well as fill the debt with specified amount using = when returning. Just feel free to use any style in your cases.

The Package

This Go package can be installed typing

go get github.com/GreenYun/poorloan

then get the usage detail typing (after installing)

go doc -all poorloan

Future Development

To work with GPG signature is on the development agenda. The signature on/off option is preserved for future use. This accounting method is designed for distributed accounting that every single man keeps his account and, if these guys do not trust each other very much, for every entry in the file, the stakeholders use their private key to sign it.

If you are interested in ...

It is very easy that you just simply install Git and Go on your machine following their installation instruction. Then you type in the command line:

git clone https://github.com/GreenYun/poorloan.git
cd poorloan
git checkout development-master

and you are in developer mode. Read README.md in the test folder to know what to do with the test code. Feel free to make enhancement, new pull requests and new issues, even new programs to automatically process bookkeeping.