alt Hacker NewsI read this article on HN ten years ago and it has been very important to me in a career working on a special purpose accounting (for automated reconciliation of bank accounts of a payments processor).
The biggest shift from conventional accounting is the use of negative numbers instead of debit/credit.
I believe that accounting would have been a lot more accessible to professionals from science/math backgrounds if negative numbers had been used instead of debit/credit.
I think biggest challenge to introducing negative numbers in accounting now is that people don't like the look of an income account accumulating a negative balance and the expense account accumulating a positive balance. But once you bend your mind around that it makes perfect sense...expense is where the money "went" (positive), income is where the money "came from" (negative).
(The alternative sign convention would make cash on hand negative.)
That said: Credit/debit does carry an extra bit of information, because you can put negative numbers as credit/debit to convey flow going the opposite direction of the usual one. (This can also be inferred from the accounts being credit-normal or debit-normal, just wanted to note it is not 100% the same model.)
My Norwegian small business accounting system vendor (Fiken) has started to present data using +/- in addition to debit/credit columns, perhaps there is some adaption of signed numbers accounting happening..
I think the biggest challenge is that negative numbers are fundamentally a hack in this context. You don't have negative $100 in your bank account, and you don't pay negative $100 for something. Instead, you are $100 in debt or you receive $100, which is qualitatively different. Such qualitative differences should be represented using the type system.