medici

Double-entry accounting system for nodejs + mongoose

npm i medici

Basics

To use Medici you will need a working knowledge of JavaScript, Node.js, and Mongoose.

Medici divides itself into "books", each of which store journal entries and their child transactions. The cardinal rule of double-entry accounting is that "for every debit entry, there must be a corresponding credit entry" which means "everything must balance out to zero", and that rule is applied to every journal entry written to the book. If the transactions for a journal entry do not balance out to zero, the system will throw a new error with the message INVALID JOURNAL.

Books simply represent the physical book in which you would record your transactions - on a technical level, the "book" attribute simply is added as a key-value pair to both the Medici_Transactions and Medici_Journals collection to allow you to have multiple books if you want to.

Each transaction in Medici is for one account. Additionally, sub accounts can be created, and are separated by a colon. Transactions to the Assets:Cash account will appear in a query for transactions in the Assets account, but will not appear in a query for transactions in the Assets:Property account. This allows you to query, for example, all expenses, or just "office overhead" expenses (Expenses:Office Overhead).

In theory, the account names are entirely arbitrary, but you will likely want to use traditional accounting sections and subsections like assets, expenses, income, accounts receivable, accounts payable, etc. But, in the end, how you structure the accounts is entirely up to you.

Writing journal entries

Writing a journal entry is very simple. First you need a book object:

const { book } = require("medici");

// The first argument is the book name, which is used to determine which book the transactions and journals are queried from.
const myBook = new book("MyBook");

Now write an entry:

// You can specify a Date object as the second argument in the book.entry() method if you want the transaction to be for a different date than today
const journal = await myBook.entry('Received payment')
  .debit('Assets:Cash', 1000)
  .credit('Income', 1000, {client: 'Joe Blow'})
  .commit();

You can continue to chain debits and credits to the journal object until you are finished. The entry.debit() and entry.credit() methods both have the same arguments: (account, amount, meta).

You can use the "meta" field which you can use to store any additional information about the transaction that your application needs. In the example above, the client attribute is added to the transaction in the Income account, so you can later use it in a balance or transaction query to limit transactions to those for Joe Blow.

Querying Account Balance

To query account balance, just use the book.balance() method:

const { balance } = await myBook.balance({
  account: "Assets:Accounts Receivable",
  client: "Joe Blow"
});
console.log("Joe Blow owes me", balance);

Note that the meta query parameters are on the same level as the default query parameters (account, _journal, start_date, end_date). Medici parses the query and automatically turns any values that do not match top-level schema properties into meta parameters.

Retrieving Transactions

To retrieve transactions, use the book.ledger() method (here I'm using moment.js for dates):

const startDate = moment().subtract("months", 1).toDate(); // One month ago
const endDate = new Date(); // today

const transactions = await myBook.ledger({
  account: "Income",
  start_date: startDate,
  end_date: endDate
});

Voiding Journal Entries

Sometimes you will make an entry that turns out to be inaccurate or that otherwise needs to be voided. Keeping with traditional double-entry accounting, instead of simply deleting that journal entry, Medici instead will mark the entry as "voided", and then add an equal, opposite journal entry to offset the transactions in the original. This gives you a clear picture of all actions taken with your book.

To void a journal entry, you can either call the void(void_reason) method on a Medici_Journal document, or use the book.void(journal_id, void_reason) method if you know the journal document's ID.

await myBook.void("5eadfd84d7d587fb794eaacb", "I made a mistake");

If you do not specify a void reason, the system will set the memo of the new journal to the original journal's memo prepended with "[VOID]".

Document Schema

Journals are schemed in Mongoose as follows:

JournalSchema = {
  datetime: Date,
  memo: {
    type: String,
    default: ""
  },
  _transactions: [
    {
      type: Schema.Types.ObjectId,
      ref: "Medici_Transaction"
    }
  ],
  book: String,
  voided: {
    type: Boolean,
    default: false
  },
  void_reason: String
};

Transactions are schemed as follows:

TransactionSchema = {
  credit: Number,
  debit: Number,
  meta: Schema.Types.Mixed,
  datetime: Date,
  account_path: [String],
  accounts: String,
  book: String,
  memo: String,
  _journal: {
    type: Schema.Types.ObjectId,
    ref: "Medici_Journal"
  },
  timestamp: Date,
  voided: {
    type: Boolean,
    default: false
  },
  void_reason: String
};

Note that the book, datetime, memo, voided, and void_reason attributes are duplicates of their counterparts on the Journal document. These attributes will pretty much be needed on every transaction search, so they are added to the Transaction document to avoid having to populate the associated Journal every time.

Customizing the Transaction document schema

If you need to have related documents for Transactions and want to use Mongoose's populate method, or if you need to add additional fields to the schema that the meta won't satisfy, you can define your own schema for Medici_Transaction and register it before you load the Medici module. If the Medici_Transaction schema is already registered with Mongoose, Medici will use the registered schema instead of the default schema. When you specify meta values when querying or writing transactions, the system will check the Transaction schema to see if those values correspond to actual top-level fields, and if so will set those instead of the corresponding meta field.

For example, if you want transactions to have a related "person" document, you can define the transaction schema like so:

MyTransactionSchema = {
  _person: {
    type: Schema.Types.ObjectId,
    ref: "Person"
  },
  credit: Number,
  debit: Number,
  meta: Schema.Types.Mixed,
  datetime: Date,
  account_path: [String],
  accounts: String,
  book: String,
  memo: String,
  _journal: {
    type: Schema.Types.ObjectId,
    ref: "Medici_Journal"
  },
  timestamp: Date,
  voided: {
    type: Boolean,
    default: false
  },
  void_reason: String
};

Then when you query transactions using the book.ledger() method, you can specify the related documents to populate as the second argument. E.g., book.ledger({account:'Assets:Accounts Receivable'}, ['_person']).then()...

Performance

Medici v2 was slow when number of records reach 30k. Starting from v3.0 the following indexes are auto generated on the medici_transaction collection:

    "_journal": 1

    "accounts": 1,
    "book": 1,
    "approved": 1,
    "datetime": -1,
    "timestamp": -1

    "account_path.0": 1,
    "book": 1,
    "approved": 1

    "account_path.0": 1,
    "account_path.1": 1,
    "book": 1,
    "approved": 1

    "account_path.0": 1,
    "account_path.1": 1,
    "account_path.2": 1,
    "book": 1,
    "approved": 1

However, if you are doing lots of queries using the meta data (which is a typical scenario) you probably would want to add the following index(es):

    "meta.myCustomProperty": 1,
    "book": 1,
    "approved": 1,
    "datetime": -1,
    "timestamp": -1

and/or

    "meta.myCustomProperty": 1,
    "account_path.0": 1,
    "book": 1,
    "approved": 1

and/or

    "meta.myCustomProperty": 1,
    "account_path.0": 1,
    "account_path.1": 1,
    "book": 1,
    "approved": 1

and/or

    "meta.myCustomProperty": 1,
    "account_path.0": 1,
    "account_path.1": 1,
    "account_path.2": 1,
    "book": 1,
    "approved": 1

Here is how to add an index manually via MongoDB CLI or other tool:

db = db.getSiblingDB("my_db_name") 
db.getCollection("medici_transactions").createIndex({ 
    "meta.myCustomProperty": 1,
    "book": 1,
    "approved": 1,
    "datetime": -1,
    "timestamp": -1
}, {background: true})

Index memory consumption example

For medici_transactions collection with 50000 documents:

• the mandatory _id index takes about 600 KB,
• each of the medici default indexes take from 300 to 600 KB.
• your custom indexes containing meta.* properties would take 600 to 1200 KB.

Changelog

• v4.0.0

  • Node.js 8 is required now.
  • Drop support of Mongoose v4. Only v5 is supported now. (But v4 should just work, even though not tested.)
  • No API changes.

• v3.0.0

  • Add 4 mandatory indexes, otherwise queries get very slow when transactions collection grows.
  • No API changes.

• v2.0.0

  • Upgrade to use mongoose v5. To use with mongoose v4 just npm i medici@1.
  • Support node.js v10.
  • No API changes.

• v1.0.0 See this PR for more details

  • BREAKING: Dropped support of node.js v0.10, v0.12, v4, and io.js. Node.js >= v6 is supported only. This allowed to drop several production dependencies. Also, few bugs were automatically fixed.
  • BREAKING: Upgraded mongoose to v4. This allows medici to be used with wider mongodb versions.
  • Dropped production dependencies: moment, q, underscore.
  • Dropped dev dependencies: grunt, grunt-exec, grunt-contrib-coffee, grunt-sed, grunt-contrib-watch, semver.
  • No .coffee any more. Using node.js v6 compatible JavaScript only.
  • There are no API changes.
  • Fixed a bug. Transaction meta data was not voided correctly.
  • This module maintainer is now flash-oss instead of the original author jraede.