Some bits from the history of bookkeeping

Even though modern day bookkeeping dates back to 15th century Venice, to a friend of Leonardo Da Vinci, a Franciscan monk Luca Pacioli, bookkeeping has been important through human history. First records of bookkeeping have been found for example on the excavations from the areas of ancient Egypt, and Mesopotamia and from South-Asia. The ancient bookkeeping dealt with cattle, crops, dowries and different trading items, and helped to keep on track for example on the development of the amount of yearly crops. In ancient India every village had their own bookkeeper to hold records on land ownerships and revenues.

Trade increased in Europe by the end of the Crusades in 14th century in such a scale that companies with remote agencies started to emerge. This made the written bookkeeping (in Finnish= kirjanpito) and records necessary, since the business owners needed to know how their finances were doing in faraway places and that their agents in those places were acting honestly. The first record on complete double bookkeeping have been found from Genoa from 1340´s. The already mentioned mathematician Luca Pacioli was the one to write down the complete description of the bookkeeping of the Italian merchants.

The double bookkeeping introduced by Luca Pacioli revolutionized the business and economy and had already the most of the features of the modern day accounting, such as ledgers, memorandums and journals. Pacioli himself stated that by following his Venetian method the business man would always know if his business is doing good or not. Paciolis passages on bookkeeping were soon spreaded all over the Europe and eventually became the model for bookkeeping for the next 500 years. And little has changed since in the field of bookkeeping, the underlying basics still being the same as in Pacioli´s days.