re: Accounting for arbitrary/abstract "commodities" (tickets, memberships, etc)

Update for anyone who cares:


I ended up just doing the simplest thing I could think of. Instead of thinking of tickets as physical things to pass around, I'm moving the service/liability that they represent between accounts. So I just made a couple of generic accounts for "virtual" commodities, called literally Expenses:Virtual and Assets:Virtual.

So when a member registers for an event, Expenses:Virtual gets 1 EventX and Members:John gets -1 EventX (a liability, he is owed a service). Maybe a couple dozen members register and pay, then on the day of the event I make a transaction that "pays" off all the EventX's owed to members from Assets:Virtual.

Maybe it doesn't make perfect sense, or maybe it's totally arse-backwards from how this should be handled. But I understand it and it serves the purpose, I know at all times total tickets sold by event and to which members. If a member has a non-zero balance, I know he is owed services. And the concept extends to things like memberships, where a member may be owed 1 year of membership and I can automate monthly transactions of fractional memberships.

And of course it handles all the cash too.

As I mentioned, it is all plain text files, so I have it checked into a git repository. This is typically used for software development version control, but it's a great solution for any text files. I can see exactly which lines of which files changed and when, what it looked like before and after the changes, every step of the way back to their creation. It gives me unlimited undo/revert to any point in any file's history.



I'm sure you guys couldn't care less about all this, but to me this is very exciting. There is already a robust set of tools to handle all of the typical accounting reports, queries, and exports, but more importantly this system makes my accounting data programmable. There is no limit to the ways I can enter, manipulate, or view the data. Accounting is fun for me now.