EVOLUTIONARY DOUBLE ENTRY ACCOUNTING: BEFORE AND AFTER LUCA PIACIOLO'S SUMMA

Abstract

Both as researchers and as ordinary people, we often go too easily over the history of human knowledge. Science constrains us to carefully analyze the past, an act that guides our steps in the present and future. We often rush to decree ideas and opinions present in our universe since several centuries ago as discoveries of the modern world. The truth is that Luca Paciolo is one of the most commented authors in the history of mankind, some assessing the number of scientists and not only who debated and criticized in writing his famous work at over 1700.                                                                                             Luca Paciolo was born in 1445 in Borgo San Sepolcro (nowadays Sansepolcro) in the Arezzo region of the Florentine Republic, becoming a well-known mathematician who worked and taught, including at the court of Duke Ludovico Sforza in Milan. His most famous work is "Summa de l'arithmetica, geometria, proportioni e proportionalita" published in 1494, a work of mathematics and geometry that presents, in Chapter XI, for the first time for that era, the double entry accounting method. This was a turning point in the history of accounting, marking its undisputed rise to the modern form in which we know it these days. This paper aims to show the essential role that Luca Paciolo played in the development of this science, to place into a context the evolution of accounting and of the double entry but also to clarify the historical status that Paciolo had: inventor or popularizer of the double entry.