The History of Bookkeeping
Doctors have Hippocrates and philosophers have Plato.
But who is the father of bookkeeping? An Italian. A Renaissance man. A
colleague of Leonardo da Vinci. His name is Fra Luca Pacioli.
Scholars have found records of debits and
credits (the ABCs of bookkeeping) dating back to Italy in the 1300's. Following
the dark ages, business in Europe boomed and it is believed that merchants
began using the double-entry bookkeeping system--or something very close
to it--to handle the volume and complexity of transactions.
Several systems were developed by mathematicians
and businessmen to summarize and communicate business transactions, yet
only one survived to become the standard system we use today. That we owe
to the work of Fra Luca Pacioli, a multi-talented mathematician, scholar,
and philosopher.
Although Pacioli did not invent double-entry
bookkeeping, in 1494 he published the first complete textbook, "Summma
de Arithmetica, Geometria: Proportioni et Proportionalita" describing the
system with such detail and clarity that it became the standard system
for keeping accounts. And so it is today worldwide!
