The Gateway to Sharealedger
LedgerLearning.com is the long-running educational foundation established by Kip Twitchell. Through the video series "Conversations with Kip" and "Coding with Kip", LedgerLearning examines why business systems innovation slowed after early automation and how modern concepts can unlock transformative efficiencies.
Start Here: The Problem with Financial Systems
Before diving into solutions, start with the problem. In April 2018, Kip Twitchell led an impromptu 57-minute working session with IBM engineers in Bangalore, India — building the entire case from scratch using nothing but personal spending data and a whiteboard. No assumed knowledge. Real questions from the room. By the end, the core argument is complete: financial systems are built on a cost constraint that no longer exists, and the architecture hasn't changed.
Key ideas: why your bank can't show you five years of line-item history; why every night banks spend hours "posting" — a word most accountants today don't recognize; why reconciliation can never be fully automated; and why 30% of financial services operating costs may be people manually running computers backwards.
The Problem with Financial Systems: An Overview
Filmed April 10, 2018 · IBM Office, Bangalore, India · 56:56 · Unpublished episode of Conversations with Kip
Principles Lecture — Michigan State University
Delivered for Michigan State University students under the direction of Dr. William E. McCarthy, the inventor of the renowned Resource, Event, Agent (REA) economic accounting model. This presentation outlines the historic progression of bookkeeping and establishes the principles behind perspective-independent shared ledgers.
Principles Behind Sharealedger
Full guest lecture covering accounting automation history, REA models, and the need for universal data interchange.
Bookkeeping and AI Series (Conversations with Tom Hall)
A 3-session in-depth dialogue with accountant and researcher Tom Hall, investigating mathematical and entity foundations needed for machine learning and AI to truly automate accounting tasks.
Session 1: The Entity & Questions
Tom explains the fundamental importance of an Entity and how historical accounting fails to capture modern questions.
Session 2: Metric Engines & Balances
Comparing search engines to metric engines, and preserving subledger keys without increasing cost.
Session 3: Automation Formulas
Impediments to AI adoption and going through Tom's mathematical variables and relationships.
Coding with Kip & Prototype Demonstrations
Demonstrations showing how perspective-independent balances, shared transactions, and multi-party reconciliation simulations work in practice.
Coding with Kip: Shared Ledger Proof-of-Concept
Demonstrating consumer, merchant, and bank interactions posting to a unified ledger without asynchronous reconciliation delays.
Core LedgerLearning Themes
The Accounting Equation
Why Assets = Liabilities + Equity was revolutionary for manual books, and how modern databases can generalize dual-aspect accounting across multiple organizations.
The REA Framework
Resource-Event-Agent modeling pioneered by Dr. William E. McCarthy, separating the underlying economic events from the artificial debit/credit artifacts created to record them.
High-Performance Engines
Applying high-throughput data processing engines (like GenevaERS) to process millions of ledger balance updates in seconds rather than batch overnights.
Looking for the research papers and datasets?
Full monograph research PDFs (Minimum Cost Curve, Pre-Hierarchy Event Repositories), progression PowerPoint archives, and test ledger fixtures are hosted in our private member repository.