quotient

Curious if anyone else has this problem:

We have some configuration data that our non-technical, business employees that need to update occasionally.

That has to be approved to make sure it's correctly formatted, and then pulled into our production codebase to run.

So we've set up a flow: there's a spreadsheet (CSV) in the github repository. We've taught the non-technical user how to download it, edit it in Excel, and then submit a PR.

We then have an engineer approve the PR (as usual), and then the CSV gets pulled in on our regular deploy cycle. On startup, the server loads the configuration data from the CSV. (For configuration data that we need to persist to the DB, the server updates those rows on startup.)

Obviously this is clunky for everyone involved. Has anyone found an out-of-the-box solution for this? A regular SQL client for non-technical users doesn't work because we want (1) eng approval on data changes and (2) to coordinate data changes with our deploy cycle in general.

I thought I knew accounting & finance reasonably well as a casual investor in public and private markets, but as with most things -- the deeper I dive, the more I realize how little I know.

I'm the CEO of an early-stage technology company in an industry with meaningful financial nuance, and I'm trying to learn more deeply about how other companies thought about their key financial metrics, where to apply which ones, and how different business models lend themselves to different forms of financing. (My question is particularly inspired by another thread on HN, The Games People Play with Cash Flow[0].)

I'd appreciate any book recommendations for accounting & finance in this direction, hopefully deep in detail and aimed at executives. Intermediate/advanced texts are fine.

[0] https://commoncog.com/blog/cash-flow-games/