Historical Development of Accounting

Video Transcript

"Hi there, I'm Spence Cottam, I'm with Account Teams and we're in Salt Lake City and we help people with their accounting problems. Today I'm going to talk to you about historical development of accounting. Back in early days people used to make these little disks out of clay and stamp symbols on them to represent property like land or cattle or something like that. These eventually evolved into coins and then people could keep track of what they had using the coins and the coins eventually became money. Well after a period of the time, the money was just used for regular transactions and the accounting of what they had was done by other means. It wasn't until the 1800's that regular systems of accounting seemed to develop. It was only about 150 year old industry. Started mainly in England and spread throughout Europe and of course came over here then and that's where double entry bookkeeping was kind of started where you would enter every transaction twice. If you had a payment then you had a bill and they both were entered in rather than just enter one time. Later on this developed into full accounting businesses. Some of the very early businesses are still around today like Pricewaterhouse and DeLloyd are very well known and internationally known as accounting firms. Today there are general accepted methods of accounting that accountants have to abide by to have credibility with their peers and to qualify in financial circles. There are standards in the United States and in every other country. There are some international standards which pretty much coincide with national standards of accounting. The accountant nowadays besides keeping track of your money, he'll keep track of higher cases going in and out, keep track of your assets, keep track of the value of things and he'll help you qualify for funding and for investments and for banking operations."