The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper

by Roland Allen

This all sounds oddly paper-oriented for a modern accountancy course. She’s training for a profession that lives in software – Excel, QuickBooks, Sage, SAP, Stripe – yet its technical vocabulary is a lexicon of papery metaphors. The bought ledger, cash book, general ledger and journal are a company’s everyday records, while the bookkeeper is one of its key professions. We judge a company’s health from its balance sheet; we write down – or, worse, write off – assets to calculate book value; and when we sell a company we open the books to potential buyers. In particular they will want to see the order book, which, hopefully, shows that we operate at a good margin and don’t cook

Accounting has its terms based on an incredible paper-oriented vocabulary