There are no limits when you are surrounded by people who believe in you, or by people whose expectations are not set by the short-sighted attitudes of society, or by people who help to open doors of opportunity, not close them.
So my fiance and I are going to see the musical Hamilton tonight, and I was just doing a little research and asking GPT some details about the play and what historical events I need to know in order to more enjoy the musical. I knew that Hamilton founded the First Bank of the United States, and as a database nerd, that made me wonder how did banks back in those days keep accurate track of accounts. Today, everything is computerized and stored in digital vaults basically, but here's how they used to track that stuff back in the day: they used to keep three separate ledgers.
If you came into the bank to make a withdrawal or deposit, the first ledger was called a day book or a journal, and that's where the transactions were initially recorded. From there, at the end of the day, they would be transferred to a subsidiary ledger. Usually, they would have a ledger for each client. So whereas the day book would have all the transactions for the day, each client would then have their own ledger which had just their transactions. That made it easy to see what a particular client's balance was. Beyond that, they had the general ledger which had all of the transactions summarized for all of the accounts. That makes sense why today we call it a general ledger. And of course all of these ledgers had to physically be kept secure in a vault - and for larger banks multiple ledgers were kept in different locations.
It's funny because today with the advent of AI, there's a lot of people complaining that it's going to take away their jobs. Just go back to 1800 and think about the people whose job it was at the end of the day to manually copy all of these transactions from ledger to ledger to ledger, handwriting all of this stuff with quill and paper. LOL. It reminds me of the old monks making manual copies of Bible manuscripts before the printing press. What happened to their jobs when computers came around?
Anyhow, I just thought it was interesting. Everything I know about accounting I've learned in the computer era. Took a moment to think about how it used to work back in the days of pen and paper. A lot of it makes sense now.
Of course, today we can just store everything in a single database and generate queries to show whatever we want to see, whether it's the day's transactions or a particular client's transactions or the complete transactions for the bank, but back then it must have been cumbersome. I can see, however, how having multiple ledgers like that would make it easy to catch fraud or mistakes.
Handing writing in a ledger was the thing that made me fall in love with Accounting, it was only when I got to Uni and everything was digitised that the joy was lost.
Yeah, in my youth I remember getting my first bank account, back when I was maybe 10 years old. You had that little mini ledger that came with the book of checks, and I used to remember writing in that and thinking it was the coolest thing. Of course, being a D&D player in my youth, everything was paper and pencil too. I used to love taking my time and writing calligraphy and writing out character sheets. That was all cool stuff, making maps by hand. I used to love that. You're right, computers do kind of take something away from it, the artwork of it, that is.
Kevin Yip
@Reply 2 years ago
I saw first hand what it was like to transition from all-paper to all-digital. In the early 90s, our company had to bring thousands of paper invoices that required two people to carry to our bank every month. Then in the mid-90s, the bank switched to electronic data transfers, and we started sending "electronic data interchange" (EDI) of the invoices. What used to be thousands of copies became just a 100K text file that could be sent in a few seconds. I was the one who did the tech work of such a transition, by setting up the exporting of Access data to such text files. I had to learn the specific syntax of those text files (which were and are ANSI industry standards), did testing with the bank, and finally put it into production. There were consultant companies that would do the technical work for us, but they were expensive. I saw the work involved, decided it was well within my skills, so I did it all myself. The text files in question were, in fact, just delimited plain text data that looked like this:
BIG*20070504*149965*20070125*447475***DI
REF*BT*477
REF*CL*042300
N1*BT*STEIN MART, INC.*91*STE322
N3*P.O. BOX 48130
N4*JACKSONVILLE*FL*32247
N1*ST*STEIN MART #4*91*0004
N3*5015 SHELBYVILLE RD
N4*LOUISVILLE*KY*40207
N1*SF*ABC INDUSTRIES*1*123456789
N3*100 ANY STREET STE 500
N4*ANY TOWN*NY*10001
N1*RE*GMAC COMMERCIAL CREDIT LLC*1*028862878
N3*P O BOX 403058
N4*ATLANTA*GA*303843058
ITD*01*3*****30
DTM*011*20070504
DTM*007*20070504
The asterisk is the delimiter here which separates every field. This is almost like a CSV, except it has more structure. It has tag-like items (BIG, REF, etc.) that indicate purposes, which predate similar things in HTML and XML. When I saw this, I knew it was not a huge problem for Access to handle. The biggest problem was the dial-up connection we used back then. There was no "always on" connection back then. Automating data transmission with dial-up was quite the challenge.
We switched to digital because we had to, and in fact, we were required to, because of the amount of business we had. If the business had to go digital, then EVERYONE in that chain of business had to too: buyers, suppliers, carriers, warehouses, etc. You couldn't have one guy using paper when everyone else was sending and receiving electronically. So this was an industry-wide phenomenon for us: EVERY company in the business had to transition to digital, or they just couldn't do business. And yes, that disrupted a lot of people's work. I was just fortunate that it went relatively smoothly for me and my company. The initial setup was tricky (learning the specs, doing testing, etc.), but the effort was well-spent, because we used this method of transmitting data pretty much till the end, when my company closed and I retired, in 2019.
Kevin: I came into the Consulting Realm around 1994, and so I remember having to switch a few small businesses from paper to electronic databases. By that time, most companies that I dealt with already had computerized, but they were using really old DOS-based systems, so I did more modernizing old antiquated software and bringing them up to speed with newer Microsoft Access / SQL Server databases. And yeah, don't get me started on EDI and dialup connections; that stuff was a super pain in the butt back in the day. I do not miss that.
Kevin Yip
@Reply 2 years ago
The biggest challenge in EDI was creating an "advanced ship notice" (ASN), which was a way to notify the customer that a shipment was on its way to the destination. It had to be sent in a timely fashion, and it contained tons of data: order numbers, addresses, barcode #s of the cartons (often in the hundreds), barcode #s of all the items inside all the cartons, etc. It had tons of line item info that all had to be exported from my Access database. If we didn't sent it out on time, or sent out erroneous data, we incurred monetary penalties. ASN was almost always done for huge orders and shipments, because it was the big orders that needed shipment tracking.
Sami Shamma
@Reply 2 years ago
Richard
You and your fianc' have a great night out and.
Kevin Yip
@Reply 2 years ago
I believe EDI is still used today by the more "traditional" companies. But there are newer, less tech-heavy ways of sending electronic business data nowadays. For instance, Walmart, which we did business with during the last few years of our company, handled all data transmissions in its own way, without using any industry standards like EDI. We sent and receive business data to and from Walmart not with EDI, but by using its website to upload or download Excel files. The users didn't have to learn anything about EDI at all. But there was still much technical detail to deal with, such as mass-uploading product images and descriptions to the website, etc.
It was very good. The King stole the show. Honestly, I had a hard time understanding some of the lyrics because they sing/rap so fast... but it was overall very fun. I joked with my fiance that I need subtitles. She said I'm old. LOL.
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