Post-Pacioli

The spread of the Italian accounting rules over the rest of Europe and thence further afield, was the result of treatises, some of them strongly based on Pacioli's work, describing and explaining the system and its practice. The "Quaderno doppio" (trans. Double-entry Ledger, Venice, 1534) of Domenico Manzoni da Oderzo was one of the first reproductions of Pacioli's "Particularis de Computis et Scripturis". This work, important because of elaborate examples, was very popular and widespread among merchants: it enjoyed no less than seven editions between 1534 and 1574. Other books that are directly or indirectly based on Pacioli's work are Hugh Oldcastle's "A Profitable Treatyce called the Instrument or Boke to learne to knowe the good order of the kepyng of the famous reconynge called in Latyn, Dare and Habere, and in Englyshe, Debitor and Creditor" (London, 1543), a translation of Pacioli's treatise, and Wolfgang Schweicker's "Zwifach Buchhalten" (trans. Double-entry bookkeeping, Neurenberg, 1549), a translation of the "Quaderno doppio".

It was the Dutch mathematician Simon Stevin who persuaded merchants to make it a rule to summarize accounts at the end of every year in a chapter entitled Coopmansbouckhouding op de Italiaensche wyse (Dutch: "Commercial Book-keeping in the Italian Way") of his Wisconstigheg hedachtenissen (Dutch: "Mathematical memoirs", Leiden, 1605–08). Although the balance sheet he required every enterprise to prepare every year was based on entries of the ledger, it was prepared separately from the major books of account. The oldest semi-public balance sheet recorded was that of the East India Company dated 30 April 1671, which was submitted to the company's General Meeting on in 30 August 1671. The publication and audit of the balance sheet was still a rarity in England until the passing of the Bank Charter Act 1844.

In 1863, the Dowlais Iron Company had receovered from a business slump, but had no cash to invest for a new blast furnace, despite having made a profit. To explain why there were no funds to invest, the manager made a new financial statement that was called a comparison balance sheet, which showed that the company was holding too much inventory. This new financial statement was the genesis of Cash Flow Statement that is used today.

Between the publication of Pacioli's "Particularis de Computis et Scripturis" and the 19th century, there were few other changes in accounting theory. There was a general theoretical consensus that the double-entry method was superior because it could solve so many accounting problems simultaneously, but despite this consensus, accounting practices were remarkably varied, and merchants in the 16th and 17th centuries seldom maintained the high standards of the double-entry method. The application of double entry bookkeeping varied across countries, industries, and individual firms, depending in part on its audience. This audience shifted in general from sole proprietorship alone to a larger more dispersed group of partnership, coinvestors, shareholders, and even eventually the state, as capitalism became more sophisticated.

In the Ottoman Empire, which at its peak ruled over Anatolia, Middle East, North Africa, the Balkans and parts of Eastern Europe, the merdiban (Persian: ladder or stairs) accounting system that had been adopted from the Ilkhanate in the 14th century was used for 500 years until the end of the 19th century. Both the Ilkhanians and the Ottomans used siyakat script (from the Arabic siyak, to lead or herd), which was stenographic writing style of Arabic used only in official documents which prevented ordinary people from reading important state correspondence. The title for each entry is given by extending the last letter of the first word in a straight line, so that the lines between successive entries would be laid out in the style of steps of a ladder. Permission to replace the merdiban accounting system with double-entry accounting was given by Sultan Abdülhamid II to the Ministry of Finance in 1880.