Accountancy or accounting is the art of communicating financial information about a business entity to users such as shareholders and managers. The communication is generally in the form of financial statements that show in money terms the economic resources under the control of management.
Such financial information is primarily used by managers, lenders, investors, tax authorities, regulators, and other decision makers to make resource allocation decisions between and within companies, organizations, and public agencies. It involves the process of recording, verifying, and reporting of the value of assets, liabilities, income, and expenses in the books of account (ledger) to which debit and credit entries (recognizing transactions) are chronologically posted to record changes in value (see bookkeeping ). Accounting has also been defined by the AICPA as "The art of recording, classifying, and summarizing in a significant manner and in terms of money, transactions and events which are, in part at least, of financial character, and interpreting the results thereof."
Etymology
The word "Accountant" is derived from the French word " Compter " which took its origin from the Latin word " Computare ". The word was formerly written in English as "Accomptant", but in process of time the word, which was always pronounced by dropping the "p", became gradually changed both in pronunciation and in orthography to its present form."
History
Early history
During the period 8000-3700 BCE, the Fertile Crescent witnessed the spread of small settlements supported by agricultural surplus. Tokens, shaped into simple geometric forms such as cones or spheres, were used for stewardship purposes in relation to identifying and securing this surplus, and are examples of accounts which refereed to lists of personal property. Some of them bore markings in the form of incised lines and impressed dots. Neolithic community leaders collected the surplus at regular intervals in the form of a share of the farmers’ flocks and harvests. In turn, the accumulated communal goods were redistributed to those who could not support themselves, but the greatest part was earmarked for the performance of religous rituals and festivals. In 7000 BCE, there were only some 10 token shapes because the system exclusively recorded agricultural goods, each representing one of the farm products levied at the time, such as grain, oil and domesticated animals.The number of token shapes increased to about 350 around 3500 BCE, when urban workshops started contributing to the redistribution economy. Some of the new tokens, stood for raw materials such as wool and metal, and others for finished products among which textiles, garments, jewelry, bread, beer and honey.
The true cognitive significance of the token system was to foster the manipulation of data. Compared to oral information passed on from one individual to the other, tokens were extra-somatic, that is outside the human mind. As a result, the Neolithic accountants were no longer the passive recipients of someone else’s knowledge, but they took an active part in encoding and decoding data. The token system substituted miniature counters for the real goods which eliminated their bulk and weight and allowed dealing with them in abstraction by. As a result, heavy baskets of grains and animals difficult to control could be easily counted and recounted. The accountants could add, subtract, multiply and divide by manually moving and removing counters.
The Mesopotamian civilization emerged during the period 3700-2900 BCE amid the development of technological innovations such as the plough, sailing boats and copper metal working. Clay tablets with pictographic characters appeared in this period to record commercial transactions performed by the temples. Such records preceded the earliest found examples of cuneiform writing in the form of abstract signs incised in clay tablets which were written in Sumerian by 2900 BCE in Jemdet Nasr. Therefore “token envelop accounting” not only preceded the written word but constituted the major impetus in the creation of writing and abstract counting. During the Sumerian period, token envelop accounting was replaced by flat clay tablets impressed by tokens which that merely transfered symbols. Such documents were kept by scribes, who were carefully trained to aquire the necessary literary and arithmetic skills and were held responsible for documenting financial transactions.
Simple accounting is mentioned in the Christian Bible (New Testament) in the Book of Matthew, in the Parable of the Talents. The Islamic Quran also mentions simple accounting for trade and credit arrangements.
In the twelfth century AD, the Arab writer, Ibn Taymiyyah, mentioned in his book Hisba (literally, "verification" or "calculation") detailed accounting systems used by Muslims as early as in the mid-seventh century AD These accounting practices were influenced by the Roman and the Persian civilizations that Muslims interacted with. The most detailed example Ibn Taymiyyah provides of a complex governmental accounting system is the Divan of Umar, the second Caliph of Islam, in which all revenues and disbursements were recorded. The Divan of Umar has been described in detail by various Islamic historians and was used by Muslim rulers in the Middle East with modifications and enhancements until the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
The development of mathematics and accounting were intertwined during the Renaissance. Mathematics was in the midst of a period of significant development in the late 15th century. Hindu-Arabic numerals and algebra were introduced to Europe from Arab mathematics at the end of the 10th century by the Benedictine monk Gerbert of Aurillac, but it was only after Leonardo Pisano (also known as Fibonacci) put commercial arithmetic, Hindu-Arabic numerals, and the rules of algebra together in his Liber Abaci in 1202 that Hindu-Arabic numerals became widely used in Italy.
Luca Pacioli and double-entry bookkeeping
Main articles: Luca Pacioli and Double-entry bookkeeping systemA double-entry bookkeeping system is defined as any bookkeeping system in which there was a debit and credit entry for each transaction, or for which the majority of transactions were intended to be of this form. Luca Pacioli wrote a 27-page treatise on bookkeeping that contained the first known published work on that topic, and is said to have laid the foundation for double-entry bookkeeping as it is practiced today.
Pacioli's "Summa de Arithmetica, Geometria, Proportioni et Proportionalità" (trans. "Review of Arithmetic, Geometry, Ratio and Proportion") was first printed and published in Venice in 1494. It included a 27-page treatise on bookkeeping, "Particularis de Computis et Scripturis" (trans. "Details of Accounting and Recording"). It was written primarily for, and sold mainly to, merchants who used the book as a reference text, as a source of pleasure from the mathematical puzzles it contained, and to aid the education of their sons. It represents the first known printed treatise on bookkeeping; and it is widely believed to be the forerunner of modern bookkeeping practice. In Summa Arithmetica , Pacioli introduced symbols for plus and minus for the first time in a printed book, symbols that became standard notation in Italian Renaissance mathematics. Summa Arithmetica was also the first known book printed in Italy to contain algebra.
According to Pacioli, accounting is an ad hoc ordering system devised by the merchant. Its regular use provides the merchant with continued information about his business, and allows him to evaluate how things are going and to act accordingly. Pacioli recommends the Venetian method of double-entry bookkeeping above all others. Three major books of account are at the direct basis of this system: the memoriale ( trans. memorandum), the giornale (journal), and the quaderno (ledger). The ledger is considered as the central one and is accompanied by an alphabetical index.
The nature of double-entry can be grasped by recognising that this system of bookkeeping did not simply record the things merchants traded so that they could keep track of assets or calculate profits and losses; instead as a system of writing, double-entry produced effects that exceeded transcription and calculation. One of its social effects was to proclaim the honesty of merchants as a group; one of its episoemolical effects was to make its formal precision based on a rule bound system of arithmetic seem to guarantee the accuracy of the details it recorded. Even though the information recorded in the books of account was not necessarily accurate, the combination of the double entry system's precision and the normalizing effect that precision tended to create the impression that books of account were not only precise, but accurate as well. Instead of gaining prestige from numbers, double entry bookkeeping helped confer cultural authority on numbers.
Post-Pacioli
The spread of the Italian accounting rules over the rest of Europe and thence further afield, was the result of treatises, some of them strongly based on Pacioli's work, describing and explaining the system and its practice. The "Quaderno d
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