The History of Accounting: The first-published-book on double-entry accounting was published in1494. This book served as the world’s only accounting textbook until well into the 16th century. This system includes most of the accounting cycle as we know it today. For example, the book demonstrates the use of journals and ledgers, and warns that a person should not go to sleep-at-night until the debits equal the credits!
This book also demonstrated the use of year-end closing entries and proposed that a trial balance be used to prove a balanced ledger. The ledger included assets which included (receivables and inventories), liabilities, capital, income, and expense accounts. The book alludes to a wide range of topics from accounting-ethics to cost-accounting.
Numerous tiny details of bookkeeping and record-techniques set-forth by this first published-book followed in texts and the profession for at least the next four-centuries; as accounting historian Henry Rand Hatfield put it, “persisting like buttons on our coat sleeves, long after their significance had disappeared.” This first published-book of accounting would still serve the service-based-business “bookkeeping requirements” for any service-based-business today; in this (now) 21st century.