A count house is a business’s physical location for accounting functions. Accounting is critical for compliance with tax regulations and government standards. Accounting practices date back to prehistoric times, with the first existing laws taking accounting principles into practice in 2,250 BC. The modern version of accounting originated in Venice during the Italian Renaissance in the late 1400s AD, with the double-entry method of accounting described by mathematician Fra Luca Pacioli in his book, The Collected Knowledge of Arithmetic, Geometry, Proportion and Proportionalita.
A count house is the physical location that a business uses to perform its accounting functions and may also be referred to as a compute house, since compt is an archaic form of the verb meaning to count. Not all businesses have their own accounting operations, as it is sometimes more cost-effective to have a professional accounting service perform this function. Accounting is a critical function of any modern business, however, and must be completed to government standards to comply with tax regulations and avoid auditing and government intervention in private affairs.
Accounting practices can be traced back to prehistoric times, and bookkeeping can be considered the oldest profession in the world. Keeping track of goods and services, even the most basic of commodities like food, clothing, and shelter, can be considered a form of bookkeeping. Literally the term means “to count”, and, around the year 1300 AD, it was defined as a reckoning for money given or received.
The formation of house counting practices really began to spread in early civilization, however, as commerce became widespread. This required the establishment of tradable monetary systems so as to allow for a fair valuation of goods and services. Historians place the origin of accounting records and household counting with the Babylonian Empire of 4,500 BC
The Code of Hammurabi, written in 2,250 BC in Egypt, is the first existing version of laws in human history that takes accounting principles into practice when adjudicating for various violations of the law occurs. The modern version of accounting involving a rigorous process of balancing receivables and payables is known to have originated in the accounting institutions that sprung up in Venice, Italy during the Italian Renaissance in the late 1400s AD At that time, Venice was a trading center for all of Europe, and trade from many distant regions was conducted by merchants and accountants there.
The Italian institution of the form for modern accounting principles originated in a treatise by the Italian Fra Luca Pacioli in AD 1494, a mathematician and teacher of business practices who was a friend of Leonardo da Vinci. The Summa de Arithmetica Geometria, Proportioni et Proportionalita, or The Collected Knowledge of Arithmetic, Geometry, Proportion and Proportionality, was a book like many Renaissance texts of the time which attempted to cover a wide range of science and mathematics. The Summa, however, also had a key section devoted to the double-entry method of accounting.
Pacioli’s accountancy description included the use of formal journals and records and set the stage for the strict precedent in counting house files that the books were not balanced until debits and credits had been matched. Modern-era household accounting indeed closely resembles that of 13th-century Italy, for Pacioli’s descriptions of the accounts of Venetian merchants included details such as entries for receivables, liabilities, capital goods, income, and expenses. . Current balance sheets and economic statements are also based on examples from the Summa and Pacioli laid the foundations for the practice of the fiscal year to also close account statements. His book was one of the first ever printed and widely distributed, translated into German, Russian, Dutch and English and making him a celebrity of the time leading history to label him “The Father of Accounting”.
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