ABSTRACT
Rise of Double Entry But around A.D. 1300 new ideas were arising in the Medieval city states of Italy. About that time a new accounting technique appeared that was to spr:ad rapidly and become the standard of good accountmg throughout 'Western Europe. We do not know just where double-entry book-keeping first arose or exactly how it came into being. It is, however, significant that not long before there had been a technical innovation of great importance - the introduction into \Vestern Europe of a cheaper writing material, paper, and an innovation of eq~al importance in the tools of thought, for the IndIan numbers brought to Europe by the Arabs were now coming increasingly into use; though, needless to say, the new-fangled numbers were deplored and successfully resisted for a long while by members of the Establishment of that time. But the simplicity of the new numbers made it possible for the writers of commercial arithmetics in Florence to develop improved rules for calculationl , and may well have been decisive in suggesting the pattern of double entry2. It is characteristic of the period that the first known treatise on double-entry book-keeping - Pacioli's textbook of 1494 - should form part of a comp~ndium on arithmetic, algebra and geometry, and theIr commercial applications. . .
