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LearnDoubleEntry.org official blog

Monday, March 24, 2014

Some little enhancements

The website has been updated with the release 1.4.4 of DELT.
There are some little enhancements.

It is now possible to export the data from the trial balance specifying if you want to take "closing entries" in consideration.


Closing entries are special journal entries that are not considered when the statements are prepared. This way, when the amount of, say, Purchases is shown on the Income Statement, it can be shown even if the account is already closed.

Second, the client-side code that prevents users to leave the journal entry page with unsaved data has been improved. Please report any issue you might have with this.

Third, the "net result" line for the income statement now comes straight from the Configuration of the single firm, That means that you can specify what you want there to appear. Just go to the Chart of Accounts page, and edit the line of the result account. If you have two items, one with a "debit" outstanding balance and one with a "credit" outstanding balance, the appropriate one is chosen.


Sunday, March 16, 2014

General Ledger

Do you want to have a look at the General Ledger, when all your accounts are neatly listed one under the other, with all transactions recorded for each one? You can now do it: just click on the brand new link "General Ledger" for your firm!


Wednesday, March 5, 2014

We are going social!

As you might have already noticed, the login screen changed a bit.
It is now possible to login in the website using your preferred social network credentials.


This way, you can start to complete your exercise without worrying about a new password to remember. If you have any troubles in this, just contact us through the form and we'll try to help you.

New firms to start with

We prepared two new firms that you can start with when you want to complete some exercises.


The Empty Firm has no accounts at all, but has some basic configuration for the statements and the positions of accounts. You can use it if you want to prepare (or import from a spreadsheet) your own Chart of Accounts.

US GAAP Simple Firm has a very basic Chart of Accounts, straight from the Wikipedia page. You can of course edit it as you wish.

Don't forget that you can add accounts on the fly, when you are preparing a journal entry, simply by adding an exclamation mark after their name (you can decide later where to put it in the Chart of Accounts).

Sunday, February 2, 2014

Statements and Chart of Accounts

The statements of the firms on LearnDoubleEntry.org can now be customized. The code of the application has been improved to allow for the definition of different statements. It is possible, this way, to call your Income Statement in a different way (say, for instance, Profits and Losses), or to prepare Statements for entities like US not-for-profit organizations, where you need three sections of the Statement of Activities, like Changes in Unrestricted Net Assets, Changes in Temporarily Restricted Net Assets, and Changes in Permanently Restricted Net Assets (we'll come to this in a next blog post).

Also, the name of the statements are now internationalized the same way the name of the accounts are.

To access the configuration of the statements, you just need to go to the Chart of Accounts page, and then click on the "Configuration" link on the right. For firms forked from the provided Standard Firm, you should see something like this:


Four "statements" are defined:
  • a Balance Sheet, where you have Assets and Liabilities and Equity;
  • a statement for Control Accounts, that contains amount not yet;
  • a statement for Memorandum Accounts;
  • an Income Statement, with Profits and Losses.
Control Accounts are the ones for which you don't know in advance whether the outstanding balance will be in debit or in credit. Common examples are bank accounts and Value Added Tax control account. In the final Financial Statement the amounts of this accounts will be posted to the correct destination, but if you want to have a look at it before, you will find the amounts in this statement.

Memorandum Accounts are the ones where you keep track of Committments and Risks the firm faces.

Every "statement" is characterized by an uppercase letter. The same letter, but lowercase, is used to specify the accounts that are used for closing entries.

When you create a new account, you must specify its type, and you may notice that the types are the ones defined int the Statements Configuration:

Since everything is customizable, you might try to use a different configuration. In case of problems, just let us know.