Accounts

See also Open Accounting

Currency

Problem

Our income will be in BTC and most outgoings in banker money. How do we do the accounts? This problem will only exist initially and will be avoided when we are fully peer to peer because we will not deal in banker money at all then. See Payment System.

Solution

There is no solution except to get rid of the parasite bankers and their “money”. In the meantime we focus on being part of that solutiion and that means we do our accounts in BTC. It’s a bit messy but less messy than doing it in USD. There are two possible scenarios:

  • We can pay out with BTC. – No problem.
  • We can only pay with banker money, or the recipient uses some stupid system like Bitpay which charges even more than the bankers do. – Then we pay out BTC to a human who does the purchase on our behalf. This would necessarily be in arrears, not in advance. The BTC reipient can provide the txid as proof.

So this way we never have to put anything but BTC through our accounting system.

System

Existing accounts systems have to deal with banker money, and all sorts of other things we don’t need. So we will have to use a simple online spreadsheet software, not a specific accounts software as it would take longer to strip out all the crud than to make a simple spreadsheet like we need. There are some requirements listed below.

  • Simple
  • Open to the public
  • Not editable by the public!
  • Protect the identity of the users
  • Enable any user to identify their own contributions to check that they are not being lied to.
  • In the case of ClickForCharity and Direct Sponsor, Users must also be able to see who their money went to and when each transaction happened reflected in the accounts.

For the latter two items, we can give each user an ID number which only they know. This way they can check the accounts and know for sure that their own part of it is true and accurate. Also charity recipients can give sponsors their ID so they can also check that nothing dodgy is going on.

Possibly Useful Software

EtherCalc looks promising. Opensource.com have a review of it. We could create a spreadsheet on their site for free to try it out. Otherwise, there are some other suggestions on this page. I think framicalc is based on it, we could try that out first. I set up a sheet here. The guide is here.