Why you should live your life like an accountant – and how you probably already do
When asked to think about accounting, most people imagine numbers, calculators, spreadsheets and offices populated by smart-suited bean counters hunched over reports. You most certainly think about money.
But by breaking away from this image and reclaiming the term “accountant” to speak to a wider number of everyday activities, we can understand the vital, often positive role accounting plays in our lives.
Accounting is one of the oldest forms of communication in human history, perhaps even pre-dating other forms of written language. From these origins, it has been intrinsically linked with numerical, often financial, information.
The word account comes from the Latin verbcomputare, meaning to count, sum up, reckon together, which established its numerical base. Later, the French term acont tied it specifically with the counting of money – the reckoning of money received and paid. Over time, this definition has developed into our narrow association of accounting today, not only with counting, nor with the counting of money, but in particular the counting of money by a qualified professional: the accountant.
Justify behaviour
However, this need not be the only way to thinking of accounting – or accountants. Alongside the dominant definition that refers to managing finances, another one has developed, by which accounting is understood more broadly as “the language by which people justify their behaviour” to others. Accounting in this sense isn’t just counting (although it is still that), but also measuring, recording, explaining, justifying, evaluating. Accounting becomes the giving of accounts – and something we already do in our everyday lives.
On a simple level, and close to conventional accounting, household budgeting can be considered a form of everyday accounting. This is how the Greek philosopher Aristotle’s conception of economics, as household management, has been widely interpreted. This is a form of everyday accounting we do when we pay bills and balance household budgets, or when a child puts their pocket money in a piggy bank.
Instagram accounts like moneymum are good examples of this form of everyday accounting, closely tied to financial forms of accounting, yet very much rooted in the realities of everyday life: back-of-the-envelope maths, kitchen-table economics.
Yet we can take an everyday accounting even further, beyond the sums. Aristotle also conceived of his economics as the general managing of relationships, as a for of “social accounting”. In fact, if we think about why we account in any circumstance, it’s for this reason. Even when we account in a financial sense – when a company publishes its financial statements – it does so primarily to ensure the shareholders that their money is being well spent by those who run the business. From this perspective, accounting is not about money, but about communication between people and in the interests of transparency.
