alt Hacker NewsI'm not presuming I know anything about accounting. I know a great deal about data recording and management though, and my analysis is done from that perspective.
I explicitly recognized that the practice of accounting as a discipline keeps using traditional concepts that are culturally adequate for its purpose. What my posts are pointing out is that the original reason for double-entry records, which was having redundant data checks, is no longer a technical need in order to guarantee consistency because computers are already doing it automatically. From the pure data management perspective I'm analysing, that's undeniable.
The most obvious consequence of this analysis is that traditional bookkeeping is no longer the only viable way of traking accountability; new tools open the possibility of exploring alternative methods.
Compare it to music notation; people keep proposing new ways to write music scores, some of them computer assisted; and though none of them is going to replace the traditional way any time soon, there are places where alternative methods may prove useful; such as guitar tablature, or piano-roll sheets for digital samplers. The same could be true for accounting (and in fact some people in this thread have pointed out at different ways to build accounting software such as the Resources, Events, Agents model.)