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A brief history of accounting

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)

Luca Pacioli,the father of accounting

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