DICHOSO, MITCH FAWLEY L.

BSA205A
THE HISTORY OF ACCOUNTING
The earliest accounting records found was in Mesopotamia, 7,000 years ago. It was called
then primitive accounting systems to the time of ancient Babylon, Assyria and Sumeria. It is
consisted of records of taxes imposed by the king and collected from the people by the tax
collectors. No one is sure when and who started accounting but back then, pebbles and twigs
represents money in exchange to an animal or item of economic value. Clay tablets were also
used after some time by drawing the token symbols on it. This was considered to be the first
documents accounting system in history, and it greatly contributed to the development of the
organized numbering systems that are used today.
Eight hundred years ago, modern bookkeeping was already being used in Florence, Italy.
Fragments of an account book of a Florentine banker dated 1211 was known as the earliest
known evidence of the double entry-system. From that time, the art of bookkeeping continued to
grow.The oldest double-entry books were the Massari Ledgers of the Commune of Genoa
(1340).
About three hundred years later, the double-entry concept came to full fruition in Venice.
During the Renaissance period, Venice was the prime commercial city in Italy due to the
presence of commercial empires and its seaport. They developed and perfected the Double-entry
system of recordkeeping and also showed an accounting system that was highly developed,
including the first true journal used in Renaissance bookkeeping. In 1494, an Italian monk named
Luca Pacioli published a book on mathematics which includes 36 chapters explaining double
entry bookkeeping. He did not claim to be the inventor of it for he gave credit to Benedetto
Cotrugli of Dubrovnik, Croatia who was believed to have written the first double entry
bookkeeping in his book, Of Trading and the Perfect Merchant in 1458 but then it was not
published until 1573. On that, Pacioli is considered the first one who published a book
recognizing double entry bookkeeping made him the Father of Modern Accounting.
The question is how double-entry bookkeeping traveled around the world? Emergence in
Northern Italy to the modern accounting or double-entry bookkeeping begins in the Dark Ages.
The story of double entry reaches from the Crusades through the Renaissance to the factories of
industrial Britain and the policymakers of the Great Depression and the Second World War.
In 1973, the International Accounting Standards Committee was formed, and it developed a
body of accounting standards suitable for use around the world. However in 2001, the IASC was
reorganized into the International Accounting Standards Board which aims to raise the quality
and consistency of financial reporting and to have a platform of high quality and improved
standards. Since then, the harmonization of accounting standards was continuously developing
until now.