Weird Accounting Facts We Bet You Didn’t Know

Accounting and business success are two sides of the same coin. Accounting takes care of the financial aspects of the business. It is taught in colleges and accounting training institutes. Almost everything revolving around accounting deals with numbers, calculations, estimations, and decision making. So people generally take it as something serious, and it is. Accountants mean business. But there are other sides to them too.

Read on to know some unknown, some fun, and some downright weird facts about accounting and accountants.

The first-ever recorded human name in history belonged to an accountant!

Yes, you read that correctly! 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.

The British introduced the Income Tax as a temporary measure to finance the war against France

British Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger, on Jan 9th, 1799  introduced the income tax to help cover the cost of his country’s wars with France. It goes without saying that the British ruling class stuck with it even after the war and hence all the ordeal surrounding Income Tax till today!

Damn you, Mr. William!

‘Bookkeeping’ is the only English word to contain as many as three sets of double letters back-to-back

Well come to think about it, it is indeed the only such word! Hmmm.

Bubble-gum was invented by an accountant!

Bubble gum, really? Yes, Walter E. Diemer was the inventor of bubble-gum who also happened to be an accountant. He was from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the USA where he was working as an accountant at a company called Fleer in 1926 when the company president sought to cut costs by making their own gum base.

Rumour has it that the original color of the bubble-gum was bright pink because he only had that dye at hand.

Luca Pacioli, considered as the Father of Accounting, was the teacher of Leonardo da Vinci

Luca Pacioli was an Italian accountant and mathematician. He is credited with the development of accounting, and is therefore sometimes referred to as its father.

He was the trainer of Leonardo da Vinci, teaching him mathematics, and may have worked with him on a book of chess strategy.

The dreaded crime boss Al Capone was brought down by none other than accountants!

The accountant named Frank J. Wilson would earn a reputation throughout prohibition as a thorough investigator of tax returns and income on joining the United State’s Treasury Department Intelligence Unit in 1920. He yielded the much-needed information to break Al Capone’s case after reviewing – wait for it – about 2 million documents!

Want to add to our list? You’re welcome to do so! If you’re interested in taking your learning experience further and enroll in a good Accounting course, you are welcome to try ours. 

Check our Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram pages on a daily basis to know more about GST, Accounting, SAP, Advanced Excel, and the like.