The Web has plentiful resources on double-entry bookkeeping and its history.
Franz-Josef Arlinghaus has posted his useful
encyclopedia entry on the history of
Double-entry
bookkeeping.
Rob Hopcott's
Learn Accounts page has a self-paced introduction to the concept.
The Association of Chartered Accountants
in the United States has a
History of Accounting website including several pages on
Luca Pacioli and the Birth of Double-Entry Bookkeeping.
The MacTutor Archive at the University of St Andrews
has a biography of Pacioli.
Some recent information on
Benedetto Cotrugli
is available from the Instituut Pacioli in the Netherlands.
See also Miroslav Budzadzic's abstract of his research on
Benedikt Kotruljevic. For the philosophical ramifications of
double-entry bookkeeping, see selections from Alfred W. Crosby on the St Olaf's site,
an interview with John Holt
of ``How Children Fail,'' and ``Money as Global Book-keeping'' by
Marc
Desaules.
Double-Entry Bookkeeping is a method for keeping track of the income and expenditures of a small firm. Although the method dates back at least to Genoa in the 14th century, the first written description seems to be a 1458 manuscript by Benedetto Cotrugli (Benedikt Kotruljevic, of Dubrovnik). The mathematician Luca Pacioli included this technique in De Computis et Scripturis, part of his Summa de Arithmetica, Geometria, Proportioni et Proportionalita, printed on a Gutenberg press in Venice in 1494. Among the many translations and adaptations of De Computis was a work by Domenico Manzoni, a native of Oderzo, published in 1540 and entitled Quaderno doppio col suo giornale ... : ``The Double Ledger with its Journal, newly composed and organized with extreme care, following the custom of Venice.'' I used a modern reprinting of the Quaderno, in Opere Antiche di Ragioneria, Milan 1911.
The Quaderno is a textbook, and, as far as I can tell, the first book to use a realistic, fully worked out example to explain how double-entry bookkeeping works, an expository technique still used today. Manzoni leads us through a year in the life and fortunes of a Venetian merchant, one Alvise Vallaresso. We learn a lot about Alvise, because Manzoni's exposition begins with a complete inventory of the man's belongings and possessions as they were on the first of March 1540, and continues day by day tracking every lira of income and every soldo, grosso, and picciolo of expenses of his business (and of his household; the accounts were not kept separate) until the last day of February of the next year.
--Tony Phillips
Stony Brook
|
Comments:webmaster@ams.org
© Copyright 2001, American Mathematical Society |