I didn’t set out to become a developer. I set out to get the books done faster.
It started with spreadsheets
Like most people in accounting, I lived in spreadsheets. They’re powerful, flexible, and — past a certain point — a liability. The moment a workbook became too important to break, it also became too fragile to change. Copy-pasting the same monthly process, hunting for the one cell that broke a total, reconciling reports that should have matched: it added up.
So I started automating. A small script here to clean a report, a little tool there to validate data before it ever hit the ledger. Each one saved an hour. Then a day. Then I stopped dreading month-end.
Accounting and code want the same things
The more I built, the more I noticed how much the two disciplines have in common:
- Precision. A penny off in a reconciliation is a problem. So is an off-by-one error. Both demand the same attention.
- Reproducibility. A good close is one you can run the same way every period. So is a good build.
- Audit trails. Accountants document why every number is what it is. Version control does the same for code.
Once I saw the overlap, the two stopped feeling like separate skills and started feeling like one.
Where I am now
I still do the accounting work — but now I do it on top of tools I trust, most of which I built or shaped myself. If you work with numbers and you’ve ever thought “there has to be a better way to do this,” there usually is. That’s most of what I’ll write about here.