ABSTRACT
This lecture was one of the first given to the Edinburgh Students’ Society. It was on a subject which was relatively new at the time, and reflects the practices of the day. The subject was auditing, and much of the emphasis was on the detection of fraud as the main audit objective. Little attention was given to the role of financial statements as an aid to decision making. The lecture represents a valuable exposition of auditing in its earliest days prior to the large-scale involvement of the accountancy profession in its execution in practice. The Gross Revenue Account, or, as some would call it, “The Trading Account,” should clearly contain only such earnings and such expenditure as are properly applicable to actual trade for the period under review, and the balance thereon should be carried to a nett revenue account, where any payments not properly chargeable against the trade of the period may then be set against it.
