Accounting is a funny thing in life. It’s a long annoying word for many and it gets presented as a thing businesses or specialists do. Both are true. But the effects that good accounting can have on family finances, small businesses, or even side ventures can’t be ignored either. Budgeting, on the other hand, is something we all engage in out of necessity. Creating budgets and working from them is what helps families at all levels of income thrive or survive. Doing budgeting well and keeping decent records is the gradual unlock that helps any venture like a family or business make progress or reach new heights. Budgeting gets portrayed as something separate and lightweight compared to accounting but this appears to be a bias by our education system toward corporate systems and situations. At its essence, accouting is budgeting, in the sense that when we ‘budget’ we are noting current assets, forecasting revenue, putting liabilitites on a timeline, and setting out savings benchmarks tied to goals and intentions.

Most families and small businesses can get by simply by budgeting. But it’s when we begin record keeping that our powers to assess the past and project into futures become greatly enhanced. These powers of projection and analysis are what everyone needs. Yet, despite the universe of tools that exist, millions if not billions of people continue to operate without these advantages. This, I think, is because our tools like our education systems are built with complex assumptions about complex operators and operations.

My goal across different business and accounting projects is to create mental models and digital tools that bring accounting down into the hands of regular people who want the benefits without a lot of jargon, onboarding and most of all without requiring them to put on the reading glassess and set aside blocks of hours and days just to “keep up with it all”. Accounting needs to be quick, ongoing, even casual, and it needs to stay anchored in the budgeting language that ultimatley everyone is after.

After a few years of experimenting with different systems, paying crazy amounts for monthly subscriptions, and fiddling around with obscure settings within apps, I discovered some free tools and a quiet obscure movement called “Plain Text Accounting”. After awhile, I realized it had unstated parallels with things like the plain language movement of the mid 1900s that sought to keep public communicaitons accessible to the majority of regular people. Not only that, but these cools such as Ledger, Hledger and Beancount, empower individuals by keeping all of their data on their own computers, offline out of the lcoud, and in easy to read text files that they can inspect and modify at any time using just stock file editing programs like Notepad.

For a bunch of reasons, Hledger stood out for me as the best option of the current 3 main plain accounting tools to keep experimenting with. I adopted it for our family and small business finances, and to be honest I was using it on and off - discipline issues! So recently I set out to make the act of record keeping much easier, much quicker, and began building a tool based around the small moments that we can squeeze in amidst each day’s obligations: log a single expense, record a bill, create an invoice, track a few hours worked and so on. The question was: how to break up the hundreds or thousands of blocks that make up an accounting system into bite-sized interactions that feel scoped to what’s on our mind in that moment?

The tool is now called Pairs and it’s first focus is on managing the finances of a small business. The desire to assist with family finances is still there and in version two we’ll introduce a set of commands that allows you to choose between company and family mode. I’ve started to use the tool for my own consulting company as a test and I’ve pushed the project to Github. If this is the kind of project that can help you or companies that you assist with please consider giving it a try and send me any and all feedback. Right now the tool is operated from the command line which can be a foreign place for many used to visual interfaces. But the project won’t end in the terminal. We’ll be experimenting with lots of different ways to make the program more visual and interfactive, from keyboard shortcuts that launch pop-ups, to browser-based versions, and maybe even a mobile app.

The concept of universal account pairs which anchors the user experience is drawn directly from my work developed under Babb Works, specifically our BitLedger project. You can read more about at: https://bitpads.org/universal-domain.html.

To read more about Pairs and download the program visit: https://github.com/peers8862/pairs.