abacus-minimal

Accounting logic should be possible to express in good code. abacus-minimal aims to be concise, correct and expressive in implementation of double entry book-keeping rules.

Progress and notable features so far:

• event-based ledger,
• contra accounts,
• period end closing,
• income statement and balance sheet before and after closing,
• saving and loading from JSON.

Install

pip install abacus-minimal

pip install git+https://github.com/epogrebnyak/abacus-minimal.git

Ledger as a sequence of events

abacus-minimal provides an accounting ledger that is controlled by events:

• chart of account changes,
• business transactions, and
• closing entries.

Given a sequence of events you can always recreate the ledger state from scratch.

Аccount creation, double entries and a command to close accounts are in the events list in an example below.

from abacus import Asset, Double, Equity, Expense, Income, Ledger, Close

events = [
    # Create accounts
    Asset("cash"),
    Equity("equity"),
    Equity("re", title="Retained earnings"),
    Income("sales"),
    Expense("salaries"),
    # Post entries
    Double("cash", "equity", 1000),
    Double("cash", "sales", 250),
    Double("salaries", "cash", 150),
    # Close period
    Close(earnings_account="re")
]
ledger = Ledger.from_list(events)

Reports reflect the state of ledger:

print(ledger.balances)
print(ledger.income_statement())
print(ledger.balance_sheet())

Ledger history can be saved to a JSON file.

Primitives

There are six types of 'primitive' events in abacus-minimal:

• add account or contra account,
• debit or credit account,
• drop account, and
• mark period end.

All compound event types translate to primitives.

In example above you can extract the primitives as following:

for p in ledger.history.primitives:
   print(p)

Ledger as class

You can also work with higher-level Chart, Book and Entry classes.

Consider an example where you need to process the following transactions and show end reports:

• a company gets $1000 equity investment from shareholders,
• bills a client $1000 plus 20% value added tax (VAT) for services,
• receives $600 installment payment,
• makes a $150 refund,
• pays $450 in salaries to the staff.

from abacus import Book, Chart, Entry

# Create chart and ledger
chart = Chart(
    assets=["cash", "ar"],
    equity=["equity"],
    liabilities=["tax_due"],
    income=["services"],
    expenses=["salaries"],
    contra_accounts={"services": ["refunds"]},
    retained_earnings="retained_earnings",
    current_earnings="current_earnings")
book = Book.from_chart(chart)

# Post entries
entries = [
    Entry("Shareholder investment").double("cash", "equity", 1000),
    Entry("Invoiced services")
       .debit("ar", 1200)
       .credit("services", 1000)
       .credit("tax_due", 200),
    Entry("Accepted payment").double("cash", "ar", 600),
    Entry("Made refund").double("refunds", "cash", 150),
    Entry("Paid salaries").double("salaries", "cash", 450),
]
book.post_many(entries)
print(book.balances)

# Close the period and show reports
book.close()
print(book.income_statement)
print(book.balance_sheet)

Everything as JSON

All data structures used are serialisable. You can write code to create a chart of accounts and a ledger, save them to JSONs or pick up data from the JSON files, restore the ledger, work on it, save again and so on.

# Save
book.save("chart.json", "history.json", allow_overwrite=True)

# Load and re-enter
book2 = Book.load_unsafe("chart.json", "history.json")

from pprint import pprint
pprint(book2) # may not fully identical to `book` yet

Accounting concepts

In abacus-minimal there are regular accounts of five types: asset, liability, equity, income, expense. Contra accounts to regular accounts are possible (eg depreciation, discounts).

Period end closes temporary accounts (income, expense and their associated contra accounts), but balance sheet and income statement are available before and after close.

Post close entries are allowed on permanent accounts.

Accounting workflow

The steps for using abacus-minimal follow the steps of a typical accounting cycle:

• create a chart of accounts,
• open ledger for the current reporting period,
• post account balances for the previous period,
• post entries that reflect business transactions within the period,
• post reconciliation and adjustment entries,
• close accounts at reporting period end,
• make post-close entries,
• show financial reports,
• save account balances data for the next reporting period.

Accounting identity

abacus-minimal adheres to the following interpretation of accounting identity.

1. The value of company property, or assets, equals to shareholder and creditor claims on the company:

Assets = Equity + Liabilities

Equity is the residual claim after creditors:

Equity = Assets - Liabilities

2. Company current earnings, or profit, equal to income less expenses associated with generating this income:

Current Earnings = Income - Expenses

Current earnings accumulate to retained earnings:

Retained Earnings = Retained Earnings From Previous Period + Current Earnings

3. Equity consists of shareholder equity, other equity accounts and retained earnings:

Equity = Shareholder Equity + Other Equity + Retained Earnings

4. Substituting we get a form of extended accounting equation:

Assets + Expenses =
   Shareholder Equity + Other Equity + Retained Earnings + Income + Liabilities

Our book-keeping goal is to reflect business events as changes to the variables while maintaining this equation.

Limitations

Several assumptions and simplifications are used to make abacus-minimal easier to develop and reason about:

• one currency
• one reporting period
• one level of accounts, no sub-accounts
• no account aggregation for reports
• account names must be globally unique (eg cannot have two accounts named "other")
• chart always has current earnings account and retained earnings account
• period end closing will transfer current earnings to retained earnings
• no account durations, current vs non-current accounts not distinguished
• other comprehensive income account (OCIA) not calculated
• no revaluations
• no intermediate accounts except current earnings
• accounts either debit normal or credit normal, no mixed accounts
• no journals, entries are posted to ledger directly
• an entry can touch any accounts
• entry amount can be positive, negative or zero
• net earnings are income less expenses, no gross profit or earnings before tax calculated
• no cash flow statement
• no statement of changes in equity
• no date or any transaction metadata recorded

Alternatives

abacus-minimal takes a lot of inspiration from the following projects:

• ledger, hledger, beancount and other plain text accounting tools,
• medici, a high performance ledger in JavaScript using Mongo database,
• microbooks API and python-accounting, a production-grade project, tightly coupled to a database.

Accounting knowledge

If you are totally new to accounting the suggested friendly course is https://www.accountingcoach.com/.

ACCA and CPA are the international and the US professional qualifications and IFRS and US GAAP are the standards for accounting recognition, measurement and disclosure.

A great overview of accounting concepts is at
[IFRS Conceptual Framework for Financial Reporting] (https://www.ifrs.org/content/dam/ifrs/publications/pdf-standards/english/2021/issued/part-a/conceptual-framework-for-financial-reporting.pdf).

Part B-G in the ACCA syllabus for the FFA exam talk about what abacus-minimal is designed for.

Textbooks and articles:

1. list of free and open source textbooks
2. Frank Wood "Business Accounting"
3. "200 Years of Accounting History Dates and Events"

Project conventions

I use just command runner to automate code maintenance tasks in this project.

just test and just fix scripts will run the following tools:

• pytest
• mypy
• black and isort --float-to-top (probably should replace with ruff format)
• ruff check
• prettier for markdown formatting
• codedown to extract Python code from README.md.

examples/readme.py is overwritten by the just readme command.

I use poetry as a package manager, but heard good things about uv that I want to try.

Changelog

• 0.14.2 (2024-11-23) Added just sql command to run database examples.
• 0.14.0 (2024-11-15) Event-based ledger now on main. Mixed test suite and pyright.
• 0.13.0 (2024-11-15) Event-based ledger will become next minor version.
• 0.12.0 (2024-11-13) events.py offers events-based ledger modification.
• 0.11.1 (2024-11-06) abacus.core now feature complete.
• 0.10.7 (2024-11-02) Posting type is a list of single entries.
• 0.10.5 (2024-10-27) Handles income statement and balances sheet before and after close.
• 0.10.0 (2024-10-24) Separates core, chart, entry and book code and tests.