#plain-text-accounting
Plain-Text Accounting
Discover the power of version-controlled, human-readable financial records
Comic Book Store Bookkeeping in 2026: Splitting Subscriptions, Back Issues, and Consignment After Diamond
A comic shop is three businesses sharing a register—non-returnable new issues, long-tail back issues, and consignment—so split them in your chart of accounts, book prepaid pull lists as deferred revenue, and capitalize grading fees into inventory instead of expensing them.
IRS Publication 544 for Small Business: How Depreciation Recapture Turns an Asset Sale Into Ordinary Income
When you sell depreciated business equipment or a vehicle, Section 1245 recharacterizes gain up to the depreciation you took as ordinary income — reported on Form 4797, not Schedule D or Schedule C. This guide walks basis, adjusted basis, amount realized, and the recapture math with plain-text bookkeeping examples.
QuickBooks Online Raised Prices 13–70% for 2026: What You'll Pay and How to Migrate Before Renewal
QuickBooks Online plans rose 13–70% for 2026 — Plus went from $90 to $110–$115/mo and Payroll added another ~20%. Here is the plan-by-plan cost, how to check your renewal date, and a four-phase migration plan to move your books without losing history.
Why Your SaaS Can Owe State Tax on Sales You Never "Made" Anywhere: The Throwback and Throwout Trap
A throwback rule can push a home-state sales factor from 20% to 60% on the same revenue by adding untaxed 'nowhere' sales back to the numerator; throwout, which shrinks the denominator instead, takes it to 33%. About 20 states plus D.C. still throw back tangible sales, five repealed their rules since 2019, and P.L. 86-272 protects none of your SaaS receipts.
App Store Payout Reconciliation: Why Your Take-Home Is ~60% Below Gross Revenue
App-store payouts land roughly 60% below sticker price after VAT, store commission, refunds, tax withholding, and currency conversion. This guide traces each deduction from gross sales to the bank deposit and lays out a 30-minute monthly reconciliation workflow for indie developers.
Food Hall Operator Bookkeeping: Percentage Rent by Vendor, CAM True-Ups, and One POS Across a Dozen Kitchens
Percentage rent by vendor (8–15% of gross sales, booked as ASC 842 variable lease income), CAM pools with annual true-ups, and one POS settlement split across a dozen merchants — the account structure a food hall operator needs, plus the benchmarks (revenue per square foot, bar share, occupancy) that show a hall is working.
ATV & UTV Rental and Guided-Tour Bookkeeping: Fleet, Insurance, and Waivers
ATV and UTV rental operators typically earn 70-80% of annual revenue in a four-to-five-month peak season, so a 15-20% off-season reserve, per-unit fleet depreciation, monthly-accrued insurance, and a waiver trail tied to rental number and unit ID are the bookkeeping controls that keep the business solvent and defensible.
Wave Accounting's Bank Feeds and Collaborator Paywall: What Changed in June 2026
Wave Accounting moved automatic bank feeds, collaborator access, and receipt scanning behind its $16-19/month Pro tier on June 1, 2026, leaving legacy free-plan (Starter) users to enter transactions manually or pay to keep those features.
Bitwave Just Open-Sourced 'Agentic Finance': What Happens When AI Agents Stop Using Your Accounting Software Like a Human Would
Bitwave open-sourced an agent-native accounting CLI and MCP server on July 23, 2026, arguing AI agents need command-line, diffable interfaces rather than GUI dashboards — the same properties git-tracked plain-text accounting has offered since before "agentic finance" was a marketing term.
How I Beancount: Eight Years of Money in Git and a 20-Minute Sunday Check-In
A software engineer walks through her real Beancount routine: receipt capture at the grocery store, a 20-minute Sunday check-in in Fava, balance assertions that work like unit tests, and eight years of family finances version-controlled in Git.
Amazon Q2 2026 Earnings: AWS Accelerates 37% as a $53B Anthropic Gain Rewrites Profit
Amazon's Q2 2026: $200.6B net sales (+19.6%) and $62.6B net income (+245%) — but $53.4B of that was a non-operating gain from revaluing its Anthropic stake. Operating income rose 43% to $27.5B as AWS accelerated to 37% growth at a 39.4% margin, while trailing free cash flow turned to a $7.6B outflow on $169B of capex. Modeled line by line in a public Beancount ledger.
DOL Form LM-2 Long Form: What the 2026 Union Financial Reporting Overhaul Means for Your Books
The DOL's May 2026 final rule creates a Form LM-2 Long Form for unions with $40 million or more in annual receipts, raises LM-2/LM-3/LM-4 filing thresholds to $350,000 and $25,000, and adds a $5,000 foreign-transaction disclosure schedule — effective for fiscal years beginning on or after July 1, 2026. Here's what changes for union bookkeeping.