Double Entry Bookkeeping Quotes & Sayings

You have to know accounting. It's the language of practical business life. It was a very useful thing to deliver to civilization. I've heard it came to civilization through Venice which of course was once the great commercial power in the Mediterranean. However, double entry bookkeeping was a hell of an invention. — Charlie Munger

Markets are as old as the crossroads. But capitalism, as we know it, is only a few hundred years old, enabled by cooperative arrangements and technologies, such as the joint-stock ownership company, shared liability insurance, double-entry bookkeeping. — Howard Rheingold

Creative accounting is an absolute curse to a civilization. One could argue that double-entry bookkeeping was one of history's great advances. Using accounting for fraud and folly is a disgrace. In a democracy, it often takes a scandal to trigger reform. Enron was the most obvious example of a business culture gone wrong in a long, long time. — Charlie Munger

Economists get very uncomfortable when you talk about virtue and vice. It doesn't lend itself to a lot of columns with numbers. But I would argue that there are big virtue effects in economics. I would say that the spreading of double-entry bookkeeping by the Monk, Fra Luce de Pacioli, was a big virtue effect in economics. It made business more controllable, and it made it more honest. — Charlie Munger

Few have heard of Fra Luca Pacioli, the inventor of double-entry bookkeeping; but he has probably had much more influence on human life than has Dante or Michelangelo. — Herbert J. Muller

Capitalism designates an economic system significantly characterized by the predominance of " capital ." Capitalism and double entry bookkeeping are absolutely indissociable; their relationship to each other is that of form to content. — Werner Sombart

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