Quotations

What I dream of is an art of balance.
Henri Matisse

Buy an annuity cheap, and make your life interesting to yourself and everybody else that watches the speculation.
Charles Dickens

Of great riches there is no real use, except it be in the distribution.
Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.
Winston Churchill

Luca Pacioli

Fra Luca Bartolomeo de Pacioli (sometimes Paccioli or Paciolo; 1446/7 – 1517) was an Italian mathematician, Franciscan friar, collaborator with Leonardo da Vinci, and seminal contributor to the field now known as accounting.

Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni et proportionalità (Venice 1494), a textbook for use in the schools of Northern Italy. It was a synthesis of the mathematical knowledge of his time and contained the first printed work on algebra written in the vernacular (i.e. the spoken language of the day). It is also notable for including the first published description of the method of bookkeeping that Venetian merchants used during the Italian Renaissance, known as the double-entry accounting system.The system he published included most of the accounting cycle as we know it today. He described the use of journals and ledgers, and warned that a person should not go to sleep at night until the debits equalled the credits. His ledger had accounts for assets (including receivables and inventories), liabilities, capital, income, and expenses — the account categories that are reported on an organization's balance sheet and income statement, respectively. He demonstrated year-end closing entries and proposed that a trial balance be used to prove a balanced ledger. Also, his treatise touches on a wide range of related topics from accounting ethics to cost accounting.

Accounting software

Accounting software makes an accounting information system.

Accounting software is typically composed of various modules, different sections dealing with particular areas of accounting. Among the most common are:

Core Modules

• - Accounts receivable—where the company enters money received
• - Accounts payable—where the company enters its bills and pays money it owes
• - General ledger—the company's "books"
• - Billing—where the company produces invoices to clients/customers
• - Stock/Inventory—where the company keeps control of its inventory
• - Purchase Order—where the company orders inventory
• - Sales Order—where the company records customer orders for the supply of inventory
• - Cash Book—where the company records collection and payment

Non Core Modules

• - Debt Collection—where the company tracks attempts to collect overdue bills (sometimes part of accounts receivable)
• - Electronic payment processing
• - Expense—where employee business-related expenses are entered
• - Inquiries—where the company looks up information on screen without any edits or additions
• - Payroll—where the company tracks salary, wages, and related taxes
• - Reports—where the company prints out data
• - Timesheet—where professionals (such as attorneys and consultants) record time worked so that it can be billed to clients
• - Purchase Requisition—where requests for purchase orders are made, approved and tracked
• - Reconciliation—compares records from parties at both sides of transactions for consistency

Different vendors will use different names for these modules.

Source: Wikipedia