Instructions for instructors

If you are a teacher or an instructor, and you want your students to practice accounting, LearnDoubleEntry.org might be the right tool to use.

These are its advantages:

• students can cooperate, sharing a firm to practice accounting on;
• everything is online, so students can work both from home or from school;
• students can login with their social accounts credentials; 
• to discuss an exercise, one just needs to share the public address of the firm;
• when an exercise is completed, the firm can be frozen, and a timestamp is applied (useful in case of assessments that have a specified due date);
• the balance sheet, the income statement and the statement of changes in equity are automatically generated, so that one can see the effect of each transaction;
• data can be easily exported to a spreadsheet, for further management;
• data can be easily backed-up (a single file download) and reimported if needed;
• it is easy to take a snapshot of the current trial balance;
• each student can see what other firms have done, so it is easy to simulate a world of firms interacting with each other (we'll soon provide an interface to make it even easier).
• journal entries are analyzed (transaction analysis);
• there are some helpful things that students can use, like an online calculator and a debit/credit swapper;
• entries can be easily excluded (for what-if scenarios);
• you can have automatic closing entries;
• the chart of accounts can be customized (it's possible to add, delete and edit accounts, to change their position in the chart, to set the ordinary outstanding balance for each account, etc.);
• the style associated with each account can be customized, in order to get, for example, colored accounts;
• you can use some smart comments;
• once a firm is created, other firms can be forked from it, inheriting all its properties (chart of accounts, templates for journal entries, custom styles, etc.);
• changes in the "parent" firm's chart of accounts can be easily transferred to its "children";
• you can get a slideshow from a firm's journal; 
• [update, February 5th, 2017] it is possible to prepare exercises/challenges for students.

If you or one of your students prepare a chart of accounts that you want other students to use, you can either pass them the slug of the firm or ask us to make it public, so that everybody will find it listed.

If you need more information, we'll be glad to help. This is an open source and free resource, and lives thanks to the contributions of its users. Just email us to info@learndoubleentry.org or use the contact form.

P.S. In Merlot.org's peer review there are two concerns that are actually unfounded:

Existing accounts in the default chart of accounts can not be deleted. As a result instructors, particulary in the U.S. will need to create their own chart of accounts. The account number, not the title must be entered when creating a journal entry, otherwise error messages occur.

Existing accounts can of course be deleted. The only limit is that an account can not be deleted when either: a) it has some children or b) it is used in some journal entry. And there is a standard US-GAAP Chart of Accounts ready to be used.

When you add a journal entry, you can choose an account by entering its code, or typing part of its name, or choosing it through a tree-view window. If this doesn't work, it might depend on browser-related issues. In case, please contact us.

Anyway, we'll try and improve the interface to make this clearer and easier.

What about colored accounts?

As an experimental feature, we added the possibility of having different styles associated with accounts in the journal of the public page and in the slideshow of a firm, here at LearnDoubleEntry.org.

Let's say you want to have all assets in blue, all liabilities in red, all revenues in green and all expenses in orange.

It's quite easy. By using the keyword @classes in the comments text box, you can specify a class for each account:

Well, actually you don't need to do that for each account. The classes you specify are automatically inherited by all the children accounts.

In the Chart of Accounts page, at the bottom, you'll find a link saying Toggle visibility of classes that helps you visualize how inheritance is applied.

For instance, you should see that all accounts children of Asset Accounts are automatically assigned the class assets:

An account can have more than a class, and inheritance is not affected. This might be useful because in a complex chart of accounts you could desire to have a distinction between fixed assets and current assets. Nothing prevents you to specify a class assets at the main level, and an additional class fixed at a lower level. The result will be that you'll have two classes for the children accounts, like fixed assets.

If you want to prevent inheritance, you can put an exclamation mark after the class name.

Once you have defined your classes, how can you get colors? In the page of the configuration of the firm, click on Show advanced options: you will be presented a text area named CSS.

Here, you can past the following text (provided as an example; you can of course adapt it to your own needs):

.assets
{
  color: blue;
}

.liabilities
{
  color: red;
}

.revenues
{
  color: green;
}

.expenses
{
  color: orange;
}

and click on Save. The result should be what you expect, a colored journal:

If you want to know more about CSS, start with reading the pages at W3School, and if you have ideas for improvements, please share them with us.

Slideshow from journal entries

Some teachers like to show the journal entries of a firm and explain them to their students. Others may ask the students to show their work, entry for entry. What about letting the application generate a slideshow from the firm's data?

It is now possible: we integrated remarkjs, a handy javascript code, into our application, and now you can show the entries, one by one, followed by the connected transaction analysis.

As an added feature, you can press "p" to toggle the so-called presenter mode, and "c" to clone your view in a different browser's window.

Let us know if you have ideas on how to improve this.

Five-star Peer Review on Merlot.org

Our website got recently a five-star peer review on Merlot.org, a program of the California State University System aimed to provide a Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching.

The review led to five stars on Content Quality, Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool and Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty.

There are some concerns, but they denote a lack of documentation on our side more than a deficiency in the application itself: in the next days we'll add some information in the handbook to fix this.

Many thanks to the reviewer!

Update: We wrote a new blog post, Instructions for Instructors, when we explain better what teachers can do and expect from the website.

Sections' visibility in public page

It is now possible to toggle the visibility of the different sections of the public page of a firm: the description of the firm, the journal, and the statements. It is also possible to toggle the visibility of the excluded journal entries in the journal.

This is expecially useful if you want to print only some of the things shown in the public page.

Smart comments for accounts

For each account, you can set some comments that could help to understand how to use it or to find some extra information.

The format of the comment is free, so you can just type what you need. But, to stay organized, it is better to use some keywords to express special meanings (keywords are at the beginning of the line, prefixed with a '@' symbol).

In some of our system-provided firms, we used these keywords for ordinary accounts:

• @aka, which stands for "also known as", for accounts that could have given other names in other chart of accounts, but with the same meaning;
• @href, for URLs of web sites that explain the meaning of the account or provide examples on how to use it;
• @example, to provide an example of a situation where the account could be used, or to better explain the meaning;
• @meaning, to express the meaning of the account in a short sentence;
• @see, when we want to point to another related account (mainly to consider the difference);
• @check, when we are not sure of the name or of other information (help us to improve the chart of accounts if you can answer our doubts).

When you choose an account using the tree view window, you can check whether the meaning of the account is correct for the transaction you are recording:

Also, when you look at the ledger page of a single account, the comments are shown, so you can better evaluate if you did the correct job:

Some kewyords, if used, are specially interpreted by the application. For instance, @href makes the text afterwards a link, as you might have noticed.

Keywords and comments play a special role in the Financial Statement Configuration, where instead of accounts we have items that keep accounts organized and let us fine-tune how the Financial Statement gets prepared.

In a previous post we discussed the use of the following keywords:

• @caption, to specify the description that is shown after the title of the statement;
• @strip, to tell the application which part of the description of the journal entries has to be stripped away when analyzing accounts (for the Statement of Changes in Equity);
• @analyze, to tell the application which accounts have to be analyzed.

Here, we introduce a new one:

• @closing, that you might want to set to "no" if you don't want for the related accounts to be proposed a closing entry.

Other keywords for our smart comments could be introduced in the future. Meanwhile, you can safely play with the above ones.

Templates to the rescue!

In our last post, we saw how the Balance Sheet, the Income Statement and the Statement of Changes in Equity are prepared and shown to us by the application.

To complete the work, we have to cover another little but important detail: automation.

As you might have noticed, there is a problem when we want to prepare the Financial Statement at the end of a period (say, at the end of the month), because there is a "difference yet unexplained" showing up before we close Income Summary to Retained Earnings and Dividends to Retained Earnings. The application takes into account what has been recorded in the journal, so, before these entries, there is no way to have the correct data.

But we don't want to actually write such journal entries at the end of each month, do we?

The solution lies in preparing some templates for the journal entries, and mark them to be automatically executed each time the statements are prepared.

A template is a place where we can define how a journal entry is made. If we frequently sell services of some kind, for instance, instead of choosing each time the accounts to use, we just prepare a template for the entry.

First, let's prepare a fictious entry, as usual, but instead of clicking the "Save" button we click on the "Create Template" link:

We will be taken to a page where we can fine-tune the template:

For each account, we can choose one of the following options:

• ask, if we want the amount to be asked when we prepare the entry;
• close, if we want the amount to be computed so that the account balance goes to zero;
• balance anyway, if we want the amount to be always computed so that the entry's debits and credits balance automatically;
• balance on match, if we want the amount to be computed so that the entry's debits and credits balance, but only if the resulting amount matches the ordinary outstanding balance for that account.

For templates that are to be used manually, we'll probably want to use always ask or close. There is also an option to set if we want this template to be used automatically. We'll discuss that later.

When we use a template manually, we are presented the accounts to be used, with the boxes for debits and credits highlighted:

This saves us the need of selecting the accounts and remember where to put our numbers. Helpful, isn't it?

The powerful thing comes when we check the "Apply this template automatically" box. Let's prepare two templates for the last entries of the month.

In the first one, we want Income Summary to be closed, and Retained Earnings to be balanced to, but only if the amount is a credit (and we want the comment "Net Income" to improve how the Statement of Changes in Equity looks like):

This automatic entry will fail if we have a net loss for the month (we can choose balance anyway to avoid that this happens).

In the second  one, we want Dividends Declared to be closed, and Retained Earnings to be balanced to, unconditionally:

The list of our templates should look like the following:

We can set each template to be automatically applied or not, and we can delete it to make a new one, if we want.

What are the benefits of these automatically-applied templates? If we don't have the last journal entries in our journal, the application knows how to compute all the needed data anyway. Let's check. From our previous example, let's remove the last three entries (concerning income summary, retained earnings and dividends), and let's have a look at our Financial Statement. It will look exactly as the one that we prepared last time, with some magic going on behind the scenes.

If we are curious, or if we need to debug our templates, we can have ask the application to show us the automatically-generated entries:

We will be presented the list of the entries coming from the automatic closing of accounts from the Income Statement and from the templates that we marked as automatic:

Entries that fail are shown as striked over, to let us understand what worked or didn't work. If we look at the journal, we won't find any trace of that. (Why? Technically these insertions are made during a database transaction that is rolled back, to the previous state, at the end.)