From: Todd Boyle [tboyle@rosehill.net]
Sent: Wednesday, November 03, 1999 2:17 PM
To: James Thompson
Subject: RE: Asking an hour or two of your time

> From what I've read so far you're proposing that customers keep their
> accounting info on remote servers and several customers can post
> transactions between customers on the same server.  Right?

Yes.

The WebLedger would be a classic, low-end, flat table general ledger
in which all the debits equal the credits.  This kind of general ledger
is well understood.  This is not e-commerce at all, we're just moving
the table to a database under a webserver.

When a General Ledger is maintained someplace where service providers
can service it, a whole world of services will bloom.

This can't really happen when the table is on small business location,
due to security risks and other costs.  

I expect the server to be cheap and easy for ISPs and other service
providers to implement and maintain.  I expect most of its users to
subscribe to teh service as a sub-ledger and consolidate its transactions
with their existing systems using well-known, proven consolidation 
methods.  Since there will be no intercompany eliminations, a financial
consolidation is a simple merging of the two sets of ledger rows. This
consolidated transaction recordset will sometimes be local, and sometimes
on the PTR host.

By itself, a Webledger is cool, but not persuasive.  http://www.Netledger.com
for example, is a brilliant webledger.  But it lacks intercompany 
transactions.

What businesses really needs is: http://www.gldialtone.com/smallbus.htm
These can be achieved much more readily on a few thousand professionally-managed
webledger hosts than fifty million independent secure hosts in every home and 
business.

Everybody and their brother is selling e-commerce solutions that are
incomplete, unreconciled bookkeeping disasters, and usually blatant lock-ins.

So we're trying to devise the simplest, lowest-common-denominator way to
submit a transaction for posting by an untrusted 3rd party to their own
ledger.  Double entry accounting is the only comprehensive model for commerce,
and it's a real gold mine.  Sooner or later all the dot-coms come 
home to daddy (GAAP double entry accounting)


* Todd F. Boyle CPA    http://www.GLDialtone.com/
* International Accounting Services LLC    tboyle@rosehill.net
* 9745-128th Av NE, Kirkland WA 98033       (425) 827-3107
* XML accounting, web ledger, ASP, GL Dialtone, whatever.