As good as bitshares is, there is a lot of room for improvement. And as I get more and more enticed about the prospective of "going all in", there are things that hold me back. Accounting is the main thing and I have a few suggestions on it. Here I want to address the missing balance sheet.
Status quo
Today we are all used to the "Portfolio", "Open orders" and "margin" hidden under the dashboard button. In addition there is the "Activity", which I will address later.
The three first ones are all what a balance sheet consists of. And everyone who has ran a business at some point know the importance of it.
The problem today is that everything is scattered under these three tabs and makes it a guesswork where your funds are at every given moment. One could argue that deleting all open orders and paying the debt will make the "Portfolio" tab a good enough balance. And yes -sure it would work. But it's not very practical.
My suggestion
My suggestion is to combine the data into a easily readable sheet like this:
Please open the image in a new window to see the details.
Added functionality
I also wish for a "rollback function" to see the balance at the end of each calendar month and year end. It would be super to track ones performance and get a sense of control of what you are doing. My bank has this function and I couldn't live without it.
Conclusion
I think easing the accounting will be welcome addition for both amateurs and professionals (who require a proper balance) and make the DEX a more practical tool than it is.
I wish the correct workers, @billbutler and @svk in particular will review and consider this.
Good idea!
I also want to add reporting features to help users track gain/loss over the year. At the very least, provide a full CSV that is readable by the top tax tracking services. I think this feature depends on the nodes supporting
a full account history, which classically requires too much RAM, but may be reasonable after core upgrades that are in the works.
Yep. I fully agree. And I have an eye on that situation too.
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=26260.msg317890#msg317890
I think it would be cleaner and easier to have the total of open orders reflected in one column on the portfolio page. That way your portfolio would show open orders as well. (this would reflect the coins that you have, but are also locked in in open orders.)
Could be a way to go. On the other hand, it does not solve what is in collateral, which also belongs in a balance sheet. It also leaves a problem of space, since the portfolio page is crammed with useful and useless information. Part of what I want is a clean look, not overloaded and visually disturbing info. In the end this information is meant for accounting, not a show of how much one can cram into one page.
You know I have been feeling like I want to go all in on it too, but it seems incomplete. I can totally see this being part of rev. 3.0 of Bitshares.
That's stretching it. It's just an extra page in the UI.
Good suggestion! Why did not you publish it through Utopian? As far as I know, bitshares is an open-source project, and you could try the luck.
I added it to github. I think that is good enough.
Very good suggestion here @funkit!
I agree with you that a balance sheet section like this would be valuable to the user, and is something that a user now has to do of-chain. This does require some coding skill to extract the necessary data, and can be very complicated.
There is work going on with addressing querying larger amounts of historic data for accounts, so it's a good proposal for future work indeed.
Thank you. My data extraction capabilities prohibits me from making sense of it all. So some aid is needed. And I think that is the case for most users.
To me it is not so important if these functions are on- or offline, as long as they are functional and accessible for accountants.
Excellent suggestion...something I think would be very beneficial. Thank you for this.
Dear funkit very nice informative post.