The notion of keeping business accounts was not original to the Middle Ages: it dated back at least to the Roman republic. But double-entry bookkeeping—in which assets and liabilities were systematically listed in opposing columns and balanced out to describe numerically the state of the company—became a western business norm only in the fourteenth century when it was adopted by Italian merchants and applied across their businesses, giving them the competitive advantage of understanding their own trading performance and potential to an exact standard. Bookkeeping, the notion of corporate risk,
...more
