swaitsandClaude Opus 5.5
528c070605
A client project's invoiced revenue and a contractor's billed cost could never count toward the project: books.create_invoice and books.create_bill posted at once with untagged lines, and only a draft's line takes a class. Job costing (B-37 item 3) collects a job's billings and the supplier invoices for its direct costs on its cost sheet, so each document line now takes an optional project. The owner decided it on 2026-10-22 (plan D-43, rules.md B-37 item 8): each line takes one project or none; a document spanning N projects is N lines, each with its own amount; no percentage split, so every figure is exact; a cost truly shared among projects names none on the document and reaches projects only as entries of their own under the company's monthly allocation convention, when books.conventions has one (otherwise it stays untagged and the agent asks the human). The reasoning, stated in B-37: job costing charges a job the costs traceable to it, whole, and reaches shared costs only by allocation on a stated basis. ASC 340-40-25-7 counts as directly related both the costs traceable to a contract (25-7(a), (b), (d), (e)) and allocations of costs that relate directly to it (25-7(c)); 25-8 expenses general and administrative cost. The books carry the first whole on the document's line and the second as the allocation convention's own entries; neither is a percentage on the document (sources/fasb-asc.md, 25-7 and 25-8 added). The handbook's projects rule and the line's class parameter say the same, and no handbook sentence lets a shared cost be split across a document's lines. The accounting: the document's entry posts one revenue (an invoice's) or expense (a bill's) line per project its lines name, in the order each is first named, each the sum of that project's lines, and the untagged lines' sum as one more line (arap::document_parts, conservation checked by a proptest). A document naming no project therefore posts exactly the one line every document posted before. The receivable or payable line is never tagged: it is a balance-sheet line, which item 3 counts nothing; the payments (receive_payment, pay_bill) move cash against it and take no project either. Nothing but the projects moves: the P&L, the 1099 worksheet (payments made, B-19) and party totals (what moved the money, B-35) read the same with or without the tags (twin-books test); the projects with the untagged lines still partition the P&L. - ledger-core: DocumentLine.class_id (serde-omitted when none, so old documents serialize as before); create_invoice / create_bill split the revenue or expense side by project and tag it; an unknown project is refused whole (atomically). - ledger-store: a document line's project is journaled as class_id on invoice.created / bill.created, and the entry's line as entry.line_class_set right after its entry.line_added (the entry.posted lines carry class_id, as a hand-built entry's do). Behind a NEW journal feature, document_line_projects (KNOWN_FEATURES, declared by new books, asked for before the first journaled line, not even the control accounts written on refusal); not `projects`, which the live books already declared: the owner consents again at the next upgrade. A malformed class_id is corrupt; null or absent is none. Untagged documents journal byte for byte as before; old journals replay unchanged. - ledger-mcp: each line takes class (id or name, resolved like add_line's, every one before anything is written); the result gains notes for a finished or abandoned project, and on an invoice for an on-spec project (is there now an agreement? on spec a hoped-for payment is no receivable, B-37 item 4), tagged anyway; books lacking the feature refuse with format_upgrade_pending. books.get_entry shows a line's class_id and project. The handbook's "an invoice or bill takes no project yet" caveat now depends on the books: gone where the feature is declared, an "until their format upgrade" note where it isn't. - ledger-gui: an invoice's or bill's page (its entry's) lists the document's lines, each project a link that opens it; the demo's client invoices are tagged to "Client work", whose snapshot is now its revenue less its contractors. Looking at the page in a narrow window found a tagged line's tag pushing the amounts past the pane (any tagged entry): the name is now cut to leave the tag room, the tag itself at most half the cell. - bookspec: an `invoice` event, and `lines` with `project` on a bill or an invoice; example projects-invoice-and-bill-lines-count-by-project, worked by hand, both projects client work (Zeta 3,500.00 - 1,200.00 = 2,300.00; Harbor 200.00; untagged -1,750.00; together the P&L's 750.00; Dana's 1099 payments 1,250.00). - fuzz: fuzz_store_replay can declare journal features. - Tests: core, store, MCP, viewer, the P2-served cutover fixture and a viewer/server parity test (its month lists the same length, not empty); a tagged document's reversal nets its projects to zero, live and replayed; books.get_entry's class_id; the handbook served as a resource both ways; each fix broken to confirm its test fails (docs/testing.md). Docs: rules.md B-27 and B-37 items 3 and 8, sources/fasb-asc.md, plan/served.md D-43, mcp-interface.md, testing.md, parity.md, plan/STATUS.md. No proof changed (no kernel arithmetic: document_parts sums with the existing document_total). Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01T3gXMVt7XJPi6ens1or9Dj
Specification sources
wanderbooks' rules come from documents, not from anyone's memory. This
directory holds the authorities the engine's specs cite (docs/spec/rules.md
is the rule catalog), and every spec block in the code carries a SOURCE:
line pointing into it.
The authority stack
There is no single "bible" of US bookkeeping. Authority is layered, and the layers differ in what they cover and in whether we may copy them:
| Layer | What it governs | Copyright | Here |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pacioli (1494), Geijsbeek translation (1914) | The mechanics of double entry: debits equal credits, the trial balance, one money, writing only forward, correcting by opposite entry, closing into capital. No modern standard restates these; they predate every regulator. | Public domain | Vendored verbatim: sources/pacioli-1494.md |
| IRS: Internal Revenue Code, Treasury Regulations, publications, form instructions | Records and supporting documents, retention, accounting periods and methods, information returns (1099), capitalization (de minimis, 12-month rule), partners' capital, tax basis of purchased and contributed property (sources/irs-partnership-basis.md), payroll taxes, rounding on returns, return line items for tax categories (sources/irs-tax-lines.md) |
Public domain (17 U.S.C. §105; IRS.gov's content policy) | Vendored verbatim: sources/irs-*.md, sources/us-public-domain-status.md |
| File formats: Intuit (QuickBooks Online bank CSV, QuickBooks Desktop IIF), ECMA-376 Office Open XML, Microsoft Excel limits, Avery label sheets | What ledger-import reads and writes: bank/card CSV layouts and signs, IIF journal entries, how XLSX stores numbers and Excel's 15-digit precision, asset-label sheet geometry (Avery 5160) |
© Intuit Inc.; © Ecma International; © Microsoft; © Avery Products Corporation | Cited with short quotes, URLs, and hashes: sources/intuit-bank-csv.md, sources/intuit-iif.md, sources/xlsx-numbers.md, sources/avery-5160.md |
| FASB Accounting Standards Codification (ASC) | Authoritative US GAAP: cash flows (ASC 230), revenue and principal vs agent (ASC 606), foreign currency (ASC 830), credit losses and aging (ASC 326), property and depreciation (ASC 360) | © Financial Accounting Foundation | Cited by paragraph with short quotes only (in rules.md; the paragraphs read, with where and when, in sources/fasb-asc.md and below) |
| FASB Concepts Statement No. 8, Chapter 4 (2021) | Definitions of the five elements (it replaced Concepts Statement 6) | © Financial Accounting Foundation; non-authoritative | Cited with short quotes only |
| Textbooks (OpenStax Principles of Accounting, Vol. 1) | Conventions no standard states: normal balances, closing-entry mechanics, straight-line depreciation arithmetic | CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (incompatible with this repo's license) | Cited with short quotes and attribution only |
| Convention or decision | Where no authority speaks: aging bucket edges, cent rounding among members, closed-period locks | — | Stated as CONVENTION or DECISION, with who decided and when |
How to read a SOURCE line
SOURCE: Pacioli ch. 36 (sources/pacioli-1494.md); IRS Pub. 583 (sources/irs-records.md)
SOURCE: ASC 830-20-30-1 (cited, rules.md B-3)
SOURCE: DECISION (the owner, 2026-10-13)
SOURCE: CONVENTION (QuickBooks aging); nearest authority ASC 326-20-55-38 (illustrative)
A rule whose only source is CONVENTION or DECISION is a candidate for a human to confirm or overturn; nothing else is.
Rules added later never lock out older books
When a rule is tightened (a check added to a command), books written
before it must still open. Journal replay and the SQLite cross-check read
history through the engine's replay_* commands, which skip checks added
later; new commands go through the checked ones. Pinned by
books_written_under_older_rules_still_open (ledger-store).
Vendoring rules
- Public-domain texts are copied verbatim (whitespace normalized), each with its URL, retrieval date, and the SHA-256 of the retrieved file, so anyone can check the excerpt against the original.
- Copyrighted sources are cited by paragraph, quoted briefly, never copied.
- When an authority changes (the IRS revises a publication; a statute is amended), add the new text beside the old with its effective date. Rules that depend on dates (1099 thresholds) must say which text applies when.
- Rules that change with the law are registered in
crates/ledger-core/src/rules.rswith the years they are known for and a review date. Past what it knows, the engine refuses rather than guesses; from the review date, the MCP digest and the viewer flag the rule. Whoever updates one (human or agent) vendors the new official text here, extends the rule, and sends the change upstream: a pull request at https://github.com/swaits/wanderbooks (best), or an issue.
Open: sources we could not verify
Read on 2026-10-13 through Deloitte's free DART roadmaps, which reproduce
ASC text: ASC 230-10-45-16 and -28, 326-20-55-37/38, 606-10-25-23, 45-2,
55-37/38, 830-20-30-1. Read directly in the ASC basic view on 2026-10-14
(sources/fasb-asc.md): 360-10-35-4, 340-10-05-2/4/5, 210-10-45-1/2/5,
230-10-45-7/10/12/13/14/15, 606-10-55-36 through 55-38. Read on
2026-10-20 where public sources reproduce the Codification (EY's FRD on
the statement of cash flows, July 2026; FASB ASUs 2016-15 and 2016-18;
Deloitte's public DART Roadmap): ASC 230-10-10-1, 45-1, 45-4, 45-5,
45-8, 45-9, 45-12(c), 45-13(c), 45-14(a), 45-15(a)/(c), 45-16(a)/(b),
45-17, 45-24 to 45-26, 45-28 to 45-31, 50-3 to 50-8, and 830-230-45-1;
each checked again against the same sources in the P3 review (numbers,
pages and wording hold). Open: 105-10-05-1 to 05-3, read only in their
2009 text (ASU 2009-01, and as Wiley GAAP 2020 quotes them); their
current wording is unconfirmed. Also open (P3 surface review, 2026-10-21): ASC 230-10-45-15(f) (debt
issue costs, cited by B-14 rule 11) is in neither list above; ASC
606-10-25-31, 25-32 and 55-20 (B-16's over-time method) are not yet read;
B-15 rule 6 cites ASC 250 with no paragraph; B-17's 606-10-55-39 is in
neither list. Each is to be read in the ASC basic view and listed in
sources/fasb-asc.md before it is relied on further.