Amatino Manucci


Amatino Manucci gave us the earliest extant accounting of double-entry bookkeeping.
Manucci kept the accounts for Giovanni Farolfi & Company, a merchant partnership based in Nîmes, France. Manucci was a partner for the Salon, France branch. The writing, entirely in Manucci's hand, is neat, legible, and mostly well preserved. Financial records from 1299—1300 survive that he kept for the firm's branch in Salon, Provence. Although these records are incomplete, they show enough detail to be identified as double-entry bookkeeping. These details include the use of debits and credits and duality of entries. "No more is known of Amatino Manucci than this ledger that he kept." Manucci didn't invent the double entry system, that was a 100-year process. If he didn't finish the process himself, it didn't occur long before, because it was clearly finished by the time he kept the books for his company.