Comment by phil-martin

I must have read half a dozen intro-to-accounting books, and it never ever clicked for me. I understood the concepts, the benefits, but it just felt 'wrong'.

It wasn't wrong of course, there is so much history, ingenuity and the invention of double entry accounting, but I just couldn't get my brain to understand it.

The way the concepts settled in my head was: double entry accounting is just an excellent way of modelling a graph with nodes and edges. Accounts are nodes, transfers are edges. Every edge has a source and a destination.

For a paper ledger, each column is graph node, and each row is a graph edge.

That was enough for me to be able to learn the rest of the things I needed for interacting with the accounting world.

But I also realised that that description really only helps a very small part of the population. :D It makes things so much worse for most people.

"Hey could you help me understanding this accounting thing?"

"Sure, but first thing is, let's learn graph theory! You know who Dijkstra right?"

Whole buckets of nope.

But thats a digression from your actual question - whats the point?

It presents a rigid set of rules of recording transfers, everything has to have a from account and to account (i.e. a graph edge), every row must add up to zero.

Because of that, it makes it easy to spot any mistakes in data entry. If any of your rows dont add up to zero - then you've made a mistake.