Why haven't we done this yet?

If shared ledgers are such a good idea, why isn’t the world doing it this way?

Because it wasn’t possible in the past.

A ledger between two parties contains information that is shared between them. In the pre-internet dawn age, either one party had to trust the other (a bank customer might trust a bank) or each side had to keep their own accounting of what they received and what they sent, be that money or goods or services. Discrepancies between these two copies of the information would often be found later, at a time when nobody remembers the details any more.

The internet makes it possible to keep a single copy of the information where it is acecssible to both parties. However, there is usually still only one party who can modify the information (your bank, your mobile phone carrier, your electricity company, etc). The other party has to trust that the information doesn’t change without notice, and if they do notice a mistake, they have contact a human representative and go through the song and dance of listening to hold music, identifying yourself, conveying which transaction you are talking about, etc.

On a smaller scale, many people keep tabs in Excel or Google sheets. Assuming both parties have access to the sheet, this means that both need to pay close attention to what the other side changed. Accidental changes can happen, and intentional changes enable “accidental” fraud. The change history in Google sheets is not ideal for tracking down or even noticing changes to specific items.

Custom written software can structure the way both parties interact with the ledger information. That is what Flextab does. It’s not something that was ever possible before.

Hundreds of years of accounting and business reality involved unpleasant work of tracking down and discussing discrepancies in the recollection that different parties have about the flow of value between them.

We can fix that now. With Flextab.