Did the ancient Romans have double-entry bookkeeping?

Abstract

Purpose: The main purpose of the article is to establish whether the ancient Romans used double-entry bookkeeping. The secondary aim is to present a wide range of accounting vocabulary used by the Romans, which was later used by Venetian merchants and Luca Pacioli in the 1494 treatise on double-entry bookkeeping and which is still in use today.Methodology/approach: The paper uses a deductive inference method based on an anal-ysis of the economic, legal, and historiographical literature on the accounting vocabulary used in the state and private finances of the Romans. Findings: Although the terminology presented in the article suggests that the Romans had a highly developed accounting system using the principle of double entry, this was not the case. No material evidence of this has been found in accounting documents, such as single accounting records, repeated counter entries or balance sheets. Historians of ac-counting and banking rely on the analysis of secondary historical sources, such as legal literature that documents the course of trials in which account books were the main evidence. One trial that was fully described in the literature was between the partners Fannius and Roscius, in which Cicero was the defender of Roscius. The article demonstrates that Ciceros defense speech does not prove the existence of double-accounting in Rome. Reflecting on the reasons for the absence of double-entry bookkeeping, the author pre-sents de Ste. Croix's arguments, the most important of which was the Roman numerical notation system (I, V, X, L, C, M) did not force bookkeeping entries into columns. This was only done by the Arabic numeral notation system, which quickly translated into the opposite double notation.Research limitations: The lack of surviving documents and a need to rely on legal litera-ture.Originality/value: The article proves that the double notation the debit/credit convention cannot be ascribed to ancient Rome. However, the article informs the reader about the richness of the accounting and financial terminology of Rome at the turn of the era.