Amatino Manucci gave us the earliest extant accounting of double-entry bookkeeping.[1][2]
Manucci kept the accounts for Giovanni Farolfi & Company, a merchant partnership based in Nîmes, France. Manucci was a partner for the Salon, France branch. The writing, entirely in Manucci's hand, is neat, legible, and mostly well preserved.[3] Financial records from 1299—1300 survive that he kept for the firm's branch in Salon, Provence.[1] Although these records are incomplete, they show enough detail to be identified as double-entry bookkeeping.[1] These details include the use of debits and credits and duality of entries.[1] "No more is known of Amatino Manucci than this ledger that he kept."[3] Manucci didn't invent the double entry system, that was a 100-year process (perhaps a 9,000 year process). If he didn't finish the process himself, it didn't occur long before, because it was clearly finished by the time he kept the books for his company.[4]
References
- ^ a b c d G. A. Lee (1977), "The Coming of Age of Double Entry: The Giovanni Farolfi Ledger of 1299-1300", Accounting Historians Journal, 4(2): 79-95
- ^ "Part One - 'The Influence of Amatino Manucci and Luca Pacioli' and 'Louis Bachelier and his Theory of Speculation'". www.gresham.ac.uk. Retrieved 15 March 2018.
- ^ a b Smith, Fenny (2008). "The Influence of Amatino Manucci and Luca Pacioli". BSHM Bulletin: Journal of the British Society for the History of Mathematics. Taylor & Francis Group. 23: 143–156.
- ^ "HISTORY OF ACCOUNTANCY - accountancy". sites.google.com. Retrieved 2017-10-24.