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Accounting Historians Journal Vol. 34, No. 1 June 2007 pp. 91-124 Charles W. Wootton EASTERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY and Barbara E. Kemmerer EASTERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY THE EMERGENCE OF MECHANICAL ACCOUNTING IN THE U.S., 1880-1930 Abstract: For centuries, accounting was a manual process. Starting in the late 1800s, a series of technological innovations emerged that not only changed the way the accounting process was conducted but dramatically changed the workplace, the workforce, the information provided, and the accounting profession itself. By 1930, most major US companies had adopted mechanical accounting as a more efficient way of processing accounting information. This paper examines the historical development and influence of mechanical accounting in the U.S. from 1880 to 1930. INTRODUCTION For centuries, accounting was a manual process. Whether by quill or steel pens, entries were recorded by hand in the journal and posted by hand to the ledger. Although there were devices (abacus, Napier’s rods) that helped with basic computa-tions, most accounting tasks (e.g., totaling, closing entries, trial balances) were dependent upon the mental and manual dexter-ity of the accountant for their completion. In large organizations, prompt access to financial information was basically impossible due to a need to conduct extensive and time-consuming manual searches through bound ledgers, resulting in “trial balances [that] appeared at historic intervals, and departmental digests and comparison reports were almost unheard of” [Leffingwell, 1926, p. 18]. “Typically, only external transactions were re- In a vivid description of the information process before mechanization, Lef-fingwell [1926, p. 18] writes: “The average executive preferred to keep most of his facts in his head rather than burrow through the hand-made office encyclopedias Acknowledgments: We would like to thank former editor, Stephen Walker, and the current editor, Richard Fleischman, for their excellent suggestions for im-proving this paper. We also would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for the comments and suggestions which improved the paper significantly.