December 2013's newsletter

As you may have noticed, we made some improvements in LearnDoubleEntry.org website.

ENHANCEMENTS

a) it is now possible to "freeze" and "unfreeze" a firm -- this can be useful in different ways, expecially for students asked to complete an exercise with a due date (and for their teachers who must check the works submitted) -- seehttp://blog.learndoubleentry.org/2013/12/freeze-unfreeze-your-firm.html

b) a student asked to be allowed to place a graphic banner in his firm's public page -- it is now possible: just upload an image in the firm's configuration page, and you are done

c) the public page of a firm has now clickable accounts on the general journal, and this allows to access the ledger -- seehttp://blog.learndoubleentry.org/2013/12/ledgers-on-firms-public-page.html

d) when a firm is forked, the default language for the account names is now taken from the user's language preferences, if available

NEWS

In a school, LearnDoubleEntry.org has been used to play "Accounting Monopoly": students had fun, and learned a lot of things -- see http://blog.learndoubleentry.org/2013/12/accounting-monopoly.html

Please take a look at the blog post "10 ways to contribute to an open source project without writing code", by Heiko W. Rupp -- https://opensource.com/life/13/10/ten-ways-open-source-projects -- everything written there applies perfectly to this site, and we'd love to have a helping hand.

Season's greetings,

      info@learndoubleentry.org
      Follow us on Twitter: @LearnDE

October 2013's newsletter

There are some new features, and we are working to some other ones.

ENHANCEMENTS

a) a user suggested that it should be possible to enter some comments on each line of a journal entry (regarding the single "posting", ie the single account debited or credited); actually, in many books' examples, there is such a comment, so we introduced this possibility -- in the journal entry form, you can now add a comment by writing it after the name of the account, preceded by a hash sign (#); see http://blog.learndoubleentry.org/2013/09/comments-on-single-double-entry-lines.html;

b) if you want to export the current trial balance to a spreadsheet, for further analysis, you can now decide to have a text area produced, in order to be able to copy it and paste it to the spreadsheet, instead of downloading a file; this may speed up your work: just export "inline", select all, copy, go to the spreadsheet, paste, and you're done; see http://blog.learndoubleentry.org/2013/09/export-of-current-trial-balance.html;

c) we added some big icons on the dashboard (we hope you like them);

d) in the public page of a firm, you can now refer to a single journal entry by specifying its number (just click on it to have the URL); for instance, you can refer to the first of second entry of the sample exercise 3 by pointing to http://learndoubleentry.org/firms/sample-exercise-03#entry1 or http://learndoubleentry.org/firms/sample-exercise-03#entry2; and you can specify the desired level of detail for the financial statements by using the "?level=x" notation (like in http://learndoubleentry.org/firms/sample-exercise-03?level=2);

e) we refactored some code, and added some comments on it, in order to start the production of self-generated documentation; if you are a developer, or just curious about the code, get in touch with us; see http://blog.learndoubleentry.org/2013/09/delts-apis.html;

IDEAS

We'd like to prepare some little examples of businesses' activities in order to compare the different procedures, accounting standards (and traditions) around the world. Would you like to join us in this?

We really hope that you may find LearnDoubleEntry.org useful for your exercises, and we'd love to receive some feedback from you. Any ideas on how to improve the website will be greatly welcomed. And, please, feel free to spread the word and invite other people to sign up.

         info@learndoubleentry.org

         Follow us on Twitter: @LearnDE

September 2013's newsletter

We made some improvements on the website and on the code behind it, so we'd like you to know about the new features.

1. BLOG

We opened a blog that we kept updated with the most important new features.
It is available at http://blog.learndoubleentry.org/.

2. SAMPLE EXERCISES

In the blog, we posted some sample exercises, that can be used as a reference to what is possible to do. We'll post other ones soon.
You can find them at http://blog.learndoubleentry.org/search/label/exercise.

3. HANDBOOK

The sample exercises and other information are linked at http://learndoubleentry.org/site/en/handbook as a sort of preliminary handbook.

4. NEW FEATURES

We introduced some new (hopefully interesting) new features in the last months:

a) for every firm, you can now select the languages that you want your account names in;

b) it is now possible to share a firm with another user, in order to complete an exercise together, if needed;

c) you can fork (duplicate) every firm of which you know the slug (see terminology, later);

d) you can get a "transaction analysis" of each journal entry (see http://blog.learndoubleentry.org/2013/07/explanation-of-journal-entries.html);

e) it is now possible to include or exclude some journal entries, in order to test different scenarios, if needed (seehttp://blog.learndoubleentry.org/2013/08/include-or-exclude-journal-entries.html);

f) you can take a snapshot of a firm's current balances, or prepare a closing entry of selected accounts (seehttp://blog.learndoubleentry.org/2013/08/taking-snapshot-of-firms-current.html);

g) you can select an account from a tree view window, if you don't know the name or the code of the account (seehttp://blog.learndoubleentry.org/2013/08/choosing-accounts-with-tree-view.html);

h) when you prepare a journal entry, the totals of debits and credits is updated every time you leave an amount field;

i) when a user signs up, he/she can ask to be resent the activation link, in case it got lost.

5. TERMINOLOGY

We prepared a blog post explaining the meaning of some of the terms we used. It is avalaible athttp://blog.learndoubleentry.org/2013/07/notes-about-terminology.html.

6. BUG FIXES

Many minor bugs have been fixed. Thanks to the users that let us know about them!

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We really hope that you may find LearnDoubleEntry.org useful for your exercises, and we'd love to receive some feedback from you. Any ideas on how to improve the website will be greatly welcomed. And, please, feel free to spread the word and invite other people to sign up.

         info@learndoubleentry.org

         Follow us on Twitter: @LearnDE