Luca Pacioli "Father of Accounting"

Fra Luca Bartolomeo de Pacioli was a great Italian Mathematician and Accountant. He lived from 1445 to approximately 1514.

In 1470 he became a friar and travelled as a mathematics tutor until 1497.

Pacioli published several works on including:

1. Summa de arithmetica, geometrica, proportioni et proportionalita (Venice 1494), a synthesis of the mathematical knowledge of his time.
2. Geometry (1509), a Latin translation of Euclid.
   De divina proportione (Venice 1509),
3. a work on mathematical and artistic proportion.
   Summa de arithmetica... included the first published description of the method of keeping accounts that Venetian merchants used during the Italian Renaissance, known as the double-entry accounting system.

Although Pacioli reported rather than invented this system, he is widely regarded as the "Father of Accounting". The system he published included most of the accounting cycle as we know it today. He described the use of journals and ledgers, and warned that a person should not go to sleep at night until the debits equalled the credits! His ledger had assets (including receivables and inventories), liabilities, capital, income, and expense accounts. He demonstrated year-end closing entries and proposed that a trial balance be used to prove a balanced ledger. Also, his treatise alludes to a wide range of topics from accounting ethics to cost accounting.