Comment by mtlynch

>What did you find hard to understand about double entry accounting?

I didn't understand the point of the two entries.

My prior experience with bookkeeping was that I imported my bank statements into some tool and categorized each transaction. So, if I bought a cookie for $5, I'd mark that transaction as "food," and that felt intuitive to me. I didn't understand why it would become two transactions where one is food and the other is my cash. It just felt like, why split it into two? What does that do for me?

The "ah-ha" moment from Kleppman's post was seeing how it's not just about creating two entries but about defining flows between accounts. The graphs helped because they show how balances increase or decrease as you traverse the nodes.

To be clear, it wasn't like I spent hours banging my head against the wall trying to understand double-entry accounting and failed until Kleppman's post. It was just that I'd encountered the idea a few times, and it never clicked until Klepmman.