Classic Double Entry Accounting and XML syndication feeds

2004-06-19T16:32:00.000+02:00

Free services can be expensive!
3,000 blogs lose their voice | CNET News.com

2004-05-05T20:20:00.000+02:00

blogger tool

I fell down on typepad.com, but beeing irritaded of its sloooow interface I have moved back to blogger.

2004-05-05T20:19:00.001+02:00

Atom is the winner of the last week

The tests with RSS made me consider well the relative strengths of Atom vs. RSS. Finally I decided to proceed with Atom.

Using Syndication Studio I created a faulty atom feed, which I have been able to see in my blogline.com account.

I've spent an awful lot of time fighting with Syndication Studio and selecting a paid blogging tool. I fell down on typepad.com.

The way ahead is to produce a small test journal, and add categories. I will also create a accounting blog.

2004-05-05T20:19:00.000+02:00

The way from OPML, through RSS to atom
I seems have more than one objective. I’m not really sure that OPML is what I’m now looking for. The new thing for me is obvious RSS Syndication as found in bloglines.com. The point that triggered me was above all its UI and its ability to show unread posts.

The OPML thing is bound to the account tree, which for me is more or less a thing of the past. As of Summa Summarium GXXI we have decided to have accounts without trees, but have various report trees.

So some of my questions were maybe in vain. What I really want is the syndication functionality, and then some possible link to OPML for the report trees. So Jeremy Bowers’s suggestion to use a link to the OPML part and have the main thing in RSS 2.0 seems pretty sane.

Both and has as a minimum title, description and link. Both have also categories. The question is whether use each channel as a ledger or an account. And use one directory (OPML) as a ledger.

The benefit of having channels as accounts are that roles could be could be assigned to accounts. In a GL for instance, it is possible to imagine a salesperson could see payments, but have no access to payroll accounts.

I have to think on storage, browsing, entering data, analyzing and confirmation.
My idea is to use:
- OMG GL entry as format
- database or XML file for the ledger
- produce RSS feeds for all new transactions

How to test ideas:
- recreate XML to RSS 2.0 format
- read XML in bloglines.com
- make test with channel = ledger and channel = account
- understand the difference between atom and RSS and OPML
- create RSS feeds from XML with XSLT
- add data to a large XML file

2004-04-30T18:56:00.000+02:00

Notes on RSS 2.0 elements that could be usable for accounting

RSS item
title - comments?
link - the URL for the scanned image or document source
guid - guid of transaction or account
comments - as usual in transactions
author - user
category - an optional sub-element of item. It has one optional attribute, domain, a string that identifies a categorization taxonomy - is suitable for accounts, category and or dimensions.

What about other accounting tags? A recent idea is to follow the RSS 2.0 spec. and use the OPML namespace to add OPML outlining capabilities. I've recently posted a message to opmldev to see if anyone can guide me.

There should also be tags for quantities etc. Useful schemas as of fall 2002 could be found in arapxml.

2004-04-28T23:50:00.001+02:00

Why some blog features may benefit CDEA.

Blogs tend to be transactional - ie. you create, publish and have to let it be. Much like accounting transactions. Which you have to void by creating a identical transaction with opposite sign.

Chart of accounts tends to be hierarchical. Many weblogs are using OPML to organize xml-feeds.

Weblogs have flags for unread posts. It could be convenient for manager to mark read transactions.

2004-04-28T23:50:00.000+02:00

Welcome to this unpretentious small personal research blog!

I'm going to tell you my experiences in these days to see how accounting, RSS and OPML can be used as part of distribution and UI for accounting.

The whole started with the eminent article of Aaron Skonnard . Fall 2000 my son Inge and I did some experimenting with accounting and OPML. I used some days digging into my data and yesterday night I luckily found it. I've made it accessible here.
This demo use the XSLT approach of OPML.