Double-entry bookkeeping - Benedikt Kotruljević

Bookkeeping is the most important part of accounting because it records the financial transactions that a company conducts. The term “bookkeeping” is derived from the fact that the financial data had once been typed using pen and ink on paper or in books. There is single-entry and double-entry bookkeeping. Single-entry bookkeeping records each transaction only once, while in double-entry bookkeeping every event is entered into two different accounts of the main account book and each business change is entered twice. Double-entry bookkeeping is therefore safer and ultimately gives a lot more business information.

The official inventor of double-entry bookkeeping is considered to be Luca Pacioli, but that system, which is still used in accounting, was first described by Dubrovnik economist Benedikt Kotruljević, 36 years before Pacioli. Namely, Kotruljević was a consul, a judge, a state minister, a head of the mint in Naples and a trader. He wrote four books, most notably the “Della mercatura et del mercante perfetto”. It is the oldest known work of entrepreneurial art and the theory of bookkeeping and balancing and one of the forerunners of contemporary economic thought. The sixth anniversary of Kotruljević’s birth was marked in 2016.