Without order, there is chaos – Luca Pacioli
Prior to the Renaissance there were no widely used standards for accounting. Records were chaotic and untrustworthy. In 1494, the Italian mathematician Luca Pacioli introduced an ordered system that included double-entry bookkeeping and balanced ledgers.
Accountants kept records in manual ledgers. Trust rested on physical custody, visible audit trails, and the local accountant’s reputation. The system worked, but did not scale.
The Digital Age solved scale through automation. Automation introduced the agency problem by replacing both the manual ledger and the local accountant with a third-party middleman. ... continued