Today’s episode of Conversations with Kip focuses on the posting process, as discussed in the Historical IBM Banking System Videos. Posting is the process of reading a set of sorted transactions and the corresponding balances for customers or accounts, and writing a new set of balances reflecting the new activity. The graphic above from the 1959 video shows clearly this process happening. This process is used in every major business process today.

Why do we post transactions to balances? Because balances are much more efficient than transactions at answering our analytical questions. Continually adding up transactions to make balances uses computing resources to do that same thing over and over and over again.

Certainly we have more computing resources today than we did in 1959, but the idea that they are so ubiquitous that we can use them wastefully is absurd. The core of every business process will continue to be a posting process for the foreseeable future in my opinion.

Watch my commentary on these videos here. This is Episode 91 of Conversations with Kip, the best financial system vlog there is.