Double Entry Quotes

“As Francesco Datini of Prato did a century before, Pacioli advises merchants to incorporate explicit signs of Christianity into their books as a way of legitimising their profit-seeking activities. The use of double entry itself was like the Catholic confession: if a merchant confessed—or accounted for—all his world activities before God, then perhaps his sins would be absolved. These Christian flourishes that Pacioli recommends merchants include in their books are therefore no mere ornaments.”
― Jane Gleeson-White, Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Shaped the Modern World

“To honour his bills of exchange, Badoer had at least four accounts with local bankers in Constantinople, where banking was organised along the same lines as on the Rialto: a bank’s primary function was not to lend money, but to transfer the funds of its depositors, who personally presented themselves to authorise the transfer of money to creditor accounts in different cities.”
― Jane Gleeson-White, Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance

“(Demanding interest on loans was not permitted anywhere in Europe until 1545, when Henry VIII legalised it in England.)”
― Jane Gleeson-White, Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance

“In 77 BC, Cicero used the evidence of a client’s well-kept ledger to argue in court for his good character and trustworthiness, saying, ‘day-books last for a month, ledgers for ever . . . day-books embrace the memory of a moment, ledgers attest the good faith and conscientiousness which ensure a man’s reputation for all time’.”
― Gleeson-White, Jane, Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance

“Destiny has ordained that from the day of my birth I should never know a whole happy day.’ Datini’s meticulously kept account books span almost fifty years and clearly show the transition from single- to double-entry bookkeeping. His”
― Jane Gleeson-White, Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance

“In the fifteenth century, multiplication with numerals was considered to be extremely difficult, and division almost impossible, an art to be attempted only by experts.”
― Jane Gleeson-White, Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance

“And today’s Frankfurt Book Fair, held annually in October, had its origins in an autumn trade fair formally established in 1240 by the German king, Frederick II.”
― Jane Gleeson-White, Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance

“Despite the general theoretical consensus about how business books should be kept and the dominance of the double-entry method in bookkeeping literature, approaches varied enormously in practice and double entry was not widely used until the rise of the corporation in the nineteenth century, as we shall see.”
― Jane Gleeson-White, Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance

“by scrutinising his books using double entry in the new industrial world, Wedgwood had uncovered the commercial benefits of mass production.”
― Jane Gleeson-White, Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance

“When railway companies faltered in the late 1840s, struggling to return 10 per cent on investments, many began to fiddle their books. For example, they treated costs as capital investments rather than as expenses, thereby inflating their profits; and used fresh investments instead of profits to pay out dividends (a strategy now known as a Ponzi scheme, made infamous most recently by Bernie Madoff in 2009).”
― Jane Gleeson-White, Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance

“Brougham’s comment reflects the rapid increase from around 1800 in the number of people in England who called themselves accountants without having any particular expertise in the field and who gave the nascent profession a bad name.”
― Jane Gleeson-White, Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance

“For example, Kuznets believed the national accounts should include the value of unpaid housework,”
― Jane Gleeson-White, Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance

“Seven months later, Enron filed for bankruptcy. The golden goose of corporate capitalism collapsed amid charges of ‘greed, bribery, corruption, deceit, parasitism, speculation, insider trading, scams, nepotism, tax avoidance, environmental destruction, human rights abuses, exploitation, theft of workers’ entitlements, job losses, use of state machinery against workers and Indigenous peoples, cosy relationships with government, and monopoly manipulation of prices and markets’.”
― Jane Gleeson-White, Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance

“Through the way it values - or does not - the finite resources of our planet, double entry [accounting] now has the potential to make or break life on the earth. We can continue to ignore the free gifts of nature in the accounts of our nations and corporations, and thereby continue to ruin the planet. Or we can begin to account for nature and make it thrive again. If numbers and money are the only language spoken in the global capitalist economy, then this is the language we must use. Accountants, remodelled as eco-accountants, can plan a central role in this conversation - and it is for this reason that Jonathan Watts wrote in 2010 that they may be the one last hope for life on earth. As he also pointed out, done badly, eco-accounting will mean the natural world is further 'commodified, priced, sliced and sold to the highest bidder'. But done well, it could reframe our values and transform the capitalist world in ways we are yet to imagine.”
― Jane Gleeson-White, Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Shaped the Modern World

“The ecological debt of rich countries to poor ones [estimated at US$4.32 trillion] dwarfs the entire third-world debt owed by poor nations to rich ones, which is only US$1.8 trillion.”
― Jane Gleeson-White, Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance