LearnDoubleEntry.org's aim is to offer students a way of practicing double entry bookkeeping / accounting principles without the complexity of a software that is normally used in a firm, but in an easier way than it would be by using spreadsheets or, worse, pen and paper.
On LearnDoubleEntry.org firms are public (under a Creative Common license) and can be shared amongst users. This opens up some possibilities described in the following scenarios:
- when students work in pairs or in groups, they can complete an exercise together, working on the same firm, but with different accounts; if one of them the next day is not present, the others can continue with no problems;
- when a student finishes an exercise and wants his/her teacher to check it, he/she can just send an email with the public link to the firm, that the teacher can access without even logging in;
- if you are a teacher and want to prepare an exercise, you can do so easily: you just create a new firm, make some editing to the chart of accounts, add some journal entries, and give your students the slug (a sort of code) of the firm; the students will start a new firm by forking (i.e. copying) the one that you created, and that's it;
- if you created a firm that is a good example of a basic standard firm for the students in your country, you can ask for it being considered as a system firm.
The application is fully internationalized and can be easily localized in different languages. The charts of accounts may be multilingual, in order to let students learn accounting terminology also in other languages.
From the entries in the General Journal, an automatic generation / rendering of the Trial Balance, the General Ledger, the Balance Sheet, and the Income Statement is given.