Accounting to Frank
Wood & Alan Sangster (2005), accounting began because people needed to:
1. Record business
transactions,
2. Know if they were being financially
successful, and
3. Know
how much they owned and how much they owed.
It is known to have
existed in one form or another since at least 3,500 BC (records exist which
indicate its use at that time in Mesopotamia). There is also considerable
evidence of accounting being practiced in ancient times in Egypt, china, Greece,
and Rome. In England, the ‘pipe roll’, the oldest surviving accounting record
in the English language, contains an annual description of rents, fines and
taxes due to the king of England, from 1130 to 1830. However, it was only when
Paciloi wrote about it in 1494 or, to be more precise, wrote about a branch of
accounting called, ‘bookkeeping’ that accounting began to be standardized and recognized
as a process or procedure. No standard system for maintaining accounting
records had been developed before this because the circumstances of the day did
not make it practicable for anyone to do so – there was little point, for
example, of anyone devising a formal system of accounting if the people who
would be required to ‘do’ accounting did not know how to read or write. (Frank
Wood & Alan Sangster, 2005)
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Luca Pacioli,the father of accounting |
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