Emergence of mechanical accounting in the U.S., 1880-1930

              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.