One thing caught my eye this summer when I visited a museum in Reykjavik. It was this old cash register.
As a self-proclaimed hledger fan, I immediately associated the cash register with its connection with accounting. Prior to cash registers, employees made change by hand. Apparently, some store staff found that diverting some of the sales money into their own pockets not only simple, but relatively easy to get away with. There was no independent record of sales at the end of the day to compare against what was in the till. Unless a manager or owner directly observed employee malfeasance, or the amount of cash at the end of the day obviously too low, there was no good way to know if staff had been honest or not in handling the store’s money.
Enter the cash register, and tracking store receipts became easier. When a cash register has the total sales, you can now check the amount of cash in the machine against what the register has recorded. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s a notable improvement to what they had before.
Plain text accounting software has a similar advantage. Not for keeping employees honest, but for keeping ourselves honest. Without keeping accurate track of the money coming into and going out of our lives, we have nothing more than impressions. Some of these impressions may be accurate, but others may not jibe with reality. Just as the cash register would help an owner know if an employee were honest, plain text accounting lets us know if we are telling ourselves honest stories about our finances. And we have a better chance of an improved future if we truthfully know where we are today.