Next Steps

Explore Advanced Features

• Tags - Add custom context to your money
• Exchanges - Convert between different asset types
• Holds - Reserve money for future use or lock down assets that may be “risky”
• Transfers - Move money between owners

Pro Tip: Bruno has pre-built requests for all these operations! We encourage you to scroll through the “current” folder in the Bruno collection to see all the operations you can perform. Try making some more requests to get a feel for the whole API surface.

Build a Real Use Case

Now that you have a solid understanding of the API, let’s build a real use case.

Think about your business and how you might use String Theory to model it. Here are some questions to get you started:

• What are the “owners” in your business model?
  • To get an idea of how other businesses understand and model ownership, check out our guide to common ownership models.
• What kind of operational groups do you plan to create and use?
  • As an example, if you are a payroll company, do you want to create groups for tax allocations? Do two allocations to the same named tax but for different dates belong in different groups?
• How are you going to generate strong idempotency keys for your operations?
• How do you want to handle uncertainty?
  • As an example, payments made via ACH are never confirmed successful and can report failures many weeks after posting. What business rules do you want to create around your accounting system to protect your business?
• If you have a single fund that is used for multiple purposes, how do you want to model it in String Theory?
  • For example, do you want to break it up into smaller pieces associated with the owners you modeled above?
  • Do you want to leverage String Theory’s Loan operation as a way to explicitly track debt when you “front” money?
  • The way you model large funds will play a big role in protecting your business from unexpected and undetected risk or loss.
• Are you integrating String Theory with an existing system?
  • If so, is there an opportunity to “start small” and build out your system incrementally?
  • For some examples:
    • Are you planning to launch a new product?
    • Can you isolate part of your existing business and run String Theory in tandem with your existing accounting systems?
    • Do you have reasonable data you could use to backfill a String Theory database for comparison?
• No matter how much you prepare, you will likely run into unexpected situations.
  • What are some possible issues or edge cases you might encounter?
  • Check out fixing data for some guidance on how to “fix forward” with String Theory.

Understand Error Handling

• Error types and how to handle them
• Idempotency - best practices
• Retry strategies

Common Questions

”How is this different from a traditional ledgering system?”

String Theory is purpose-built for accounting and financial operations at any scale. Modern businesses deserve modern solutions. We believe we’ve built the best ledgering system in the world, and we’re excited to share it with you. Check out our blog posts like The Attribution Problem to learn more about what makes us different.

”What about performance at scale?”

The system is designed to handle billions of transactions with the ability to shard data by owner and efficient querying through groups and threads.

”How do I handle complex business logic?”

Groups and tags give you the flexibility to implement complex business rules while maintaining data integrity. The API is designed to handle sophisticated financial workflows.

”What if I make a mistake?”

Every operation is auditable and correctable. You can trace exactly what happened and implement corrections without losing data integrity. This is usually simple, but in rare cases, correcting mistakes could be more complicated, so we’ve provided a guide to help you out.

Conclusion

You’ve now taken your first steps with String Theory! You’ve:

• ✅ Gone through a basic Deposit -> Observe -> Withdraw workflow with the API
• ✅ Organized money with Groups
• ✅ Observed your data in the UI
• ✅ Learned about some advanced features and concepts
• ✅ Started modeling your business with String Theory

This foundation gives you the tools to evaluate String Theory for your business needs. The key is to start simple and gradually build complexity as you understand how the system works.

Remember: String Theory is designed to grow with you. Start with basic operations, add complexity as needed, and leverage the built-in safeguards to build robust financial systems.

Ready to dive deeper? Check out the concepts section or try building a more complex workflow in your demo environment!