Assessment of the quality of double-entry bookkeeping, the resources needed to create it, and the ingenuity of medieval merchants

Abstract

The traditional hypothesis about the origin of double-entry bookkeeping is based on the assumption that double-entry bookkeeping was accidentally invented and perfected during one XIII century by amateur merchants who did not have a specific purpose and did not know the methods of designing information technologies. in other words, double-entry bookkeeping is created with the involvement of minimal intellectual, financial and time resources. the whole building of this hypothesis is based on this assumption. This assumption itself is not based on anything: neither on documents, nor on estimates, nor on reasoning. the article shows by a comparative historical method the implausibility of this assumption, and hence the hypothesis about the origin of double-entry bookkeeping in general. This was done in several independent ways, which made it possible to demonstrate the outstanding qualitative characteristics of double-entry bookkeeping, the huge resources needed to create it, and the extremely insignificant ingenuity (in terms of information technology development) of the Europeans of the XIII-XV centuries (including merchants). the results of the study showed that the creation of double bookkeeping required at least five centuries of purposeful work of professional methodologists funded by the state, whereas medieval merchants were not able to invent double bookkeeping in any reasonable time.