It’s nice to be reminded of the advantages of plain text accounting over the old-fashioned keeping track of accounting with pen and paper. This happened on a recent visit to the Zimsen House in Reykjavik. Many years ago, this building once hosted a small business, and the current owners showcase some of the paper records from that time. Let’s take a look.
Here is a display of some records from the business.
This next picture focuses in on a few of the cards for greater detail.
A couple of comments. First, I think that we can see the idea of a database here, even if these records are prior to the advent digital computers. That is, there appears to be one record per paper. Rather than writing everything down on one piece of paper until it is full and then starting a new page, they have separate papers for separate entities. My guess is that the separate pieces of paper correspond to individual customers, but I can’t tell if it’s customers or something else. In any case, the individual cards show organization akin to a modern database with its tables.
Second, it’s great to see such assiduous record keeping from the past. It shows how people have realized the value in keeping their accounts in order. Glad, though, my hledger accounting is so much easier.
Finally, before actually looking closely at the records, I imagined that it would be trivial to see what they were tracking. However, once I started to examine them, it wasn’t obvious to me. I was expecting to see accounts with charges, payments, and a running balance, but it appears to be something else. If you have a good idea of what it is, post your answer on the Plain Text Accounting Forum: https://forum.plaintextaccounting.org/ under the corresponding thread there.