Thu October 4, 2012 The Accountant Who Changed The World
Originally published on Fri October 5, 2012 4:04 pm The story of
the birth of accounting begins with numbers. In the 1400s, much
of Europe was still using Roman numerals, and finding it really
hard to easily add or subtract. (Try adding MCVI to XCIV.) But
fortunately, Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3, 4, etc.) started catching
on, and with those numbers, merchants in Venice developed a
revolutionary system we now call "double-entry" bookkeeping.
This is how it works: Every transaction gets entered twice in
financial records. If one day you sold three gold coins' worth
of pepper, you would write that the amount of cash you had went
up by three gold coins. You would also write in that the amount
of pepper you had went down by three gold coins' worth. Before
double-entry, people just kept diaries and counted their money
at the end of the day. This innovation allowed merchants to see
every aspect of their business in neat little rows. Jane
Gleeson-White wrote the n