Unless you work at an accounting firm, you probably won’t meet a lot of people that are thrilled about accounting and taxes. After all, who could love making sense of the numbers day after day. Here are a few fun facts about accounting that you may not have known before.
- The word “accounting” comes from the French “compter” or “computare” meaning to count or score.
- Other accounting terms are derived from Latin, such as “debit” – “he owes” and “credit” – “he trusts.”
- ‘Bookkeeping’ is the only English word to contain three sets of double letters back-to-back!
- The first ever recorded human name in history belonged to an accountant. More than 5000 years back, probably in the Mesopotamian times, it was an ‘accountant’ named Kushim who happened to have recorded his name on a parchment paper. This was mentioned by Dr. Yuval Noah Harari in his bestseller “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind”. The writing read: “A total of 29,086 measures of barley were received over the course of 37 months” with the signature of Kushim underneath.
- Italian mathematician Luca Pacioli is regarded as the father of modern accounting. He published the first book on double-entry accounting in 1494. Leonardo da Vinci was one of his students.
- The Income Tax was originally introduced as a temporary measure to finance the war against France. On 9 January 1799, British Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger introduced income tax to help cover the cost of his country’s wars with France.
- The first CPA exam was proctored in New York on December 15, 1896. Candidates had to answer 10 questions on Accounting Theory.