现存最早的对于复式记账法的描述出自拉古萨经济学家班尼德托·科特拉格力1458年所著《贸易和完美商人》(Della mercatura e del mercante perfetto),但他的手稿于1573年才得以发表。[3][4]
1494年,意大利数学家卢卡·帕西奥利在威尼斯出版了一本数学教科书《概述:算术、几何、比例和比率》(Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni et proportionalità),在此书中他首次详尽阐述了复式记账系统,[5]帕西奥利也因此被尊为“会计学之父”。[6][7][8]
^ Parker, L. M., “Medieval Traders as International Change Agents: A Comparison
With Twentieth Century International Accounting Firms,” The Accounting
Historians Journal, 16(2) (1989): 107-118.
^Poovey, Mary. A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. University of Chicago Press. 1998: 54 [2014-08-07]. ISBN 9780226675268. (原始内容存档于2019-12-25). In the late sixteenth-century [...] number still carried the pejorative connotations associated with necromancy [...]. [...] [D]ouble-entry bookkeeping helped confer cultural authority on numbers. It did so by means of the balance [...]. For late sixteenth-century readers, the balance conjured up both the scales of justice and the symmetry of God's world.