This week I begin a series of segments of a Conversation with Rakesh Kant, an expert on financial and reporting systems, recorded in Lucknow, India, April 15, 2018. This initial video frames the discussion of financial systems by breaking the problem into a Left Hand Side (i.e., Posting) from the Right Hand Side (i.e., Reporting) problem.

The technology functions in both of these parts of the problem are fairly straightforward; they harken back to the most simple data processing paradigms:  Input – Process – Output.  Both the right hand side and the left hand side need some way of reading a selected set of data–be they transactions or balances–apply business rules to them, and producing an output.

The key difference though is that the output from the left hand side, the posting process, becomes the input to the next execution of that process.  For this reason, it must be carefully controlled, because messing up a master file is a very dangerous thing to do.

This is Episode 167 of Conversations with Kip, the best financial system vlog there is. A version containing all the video segments recorded with Rakesh is also posted below, for those with longer attention spans.  Literally learn more–about ledgers and financial systems–at LedgerLearning.com.