Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Through an approach close to the history of the institutions, this paper intends to study one of the most unknown municipal officers in Spain. We refer to the contador, comptroller or accountant, who was in charge of the control and supervision of the incomes and expenses in the main Spanish City Halls from the Middle Ages up to well entered the 19th century. First of all, the origin of the job is explained. It was related to the creation of the Supreme Auditing Board of the Royal Exchequer (Contaduría Mayor de Cuentas de la Real Hacienda) in the middle of the 14th century as an answer to the need to control and supervise the accounts presented by the municipal administrators and collectors. The paper studies the presence of municipal accountants and the evolution of their duties through all the Ancien Régime in some of the most important cities of the Castilian Crown, as Seville, Cordoba, Jaén, Murcia, Madrid or Toledo, as well as in those of the Aragonese Crown. The research pays special attention to identify the differences and similarities between the Castilian municipal contadores and the rationales, i.e., municipal accountants, comptrollers and other account officers of the Aragonese Crown. To meet this objective, the author uses basically the specific bibliography that has appeared in recent years in Spain on the municipal finances in the period under study, completing this overview with the examination of the content of the ordinances and municipal by-laws approved in that time. They have been seldom used up to now to carry out methodological approaches as the one pursued in this study. Once this overview has been accomplished, the paper analyzes some essential features that characterize the municipal contador's job. Specially we have considered the period they performed their position, the system of appointment, the oath they had to make to take up their post, their number, their salary, the qualities required to be an accountant, and their functions. Among latter following were to be found: to examine the municipal accounts, to register the payment orders and to control the collection of funds. These functions are basically the same that at present the comptrollers of the Public Administration at its local level perform. But in the five previous centuries few Town Councils disposed, like Toledo, that their contadores were professional life officers with a fitting salary. The usual thing was that this post, like others, was drawn each year among the aldermen. Consequently, lacking generally in specific training, they used to limit their functions to the examination of the accounts presented by the administrators and collectors during one or several days once a year.

The paper aims to outline the roots of matrix accounting in the Italian tradition of mathematical accounting, developed in the second half of XIX century and the first half of XX century. The research stresses the time-specific environmental factors affecting the origin and development of matrix accounting in Italy. In the second half of XIX century, thanks to Giovanni Rossi (1945-1921), who is unanimously accredited as the greatest disciple of Giuseppe Cerboni and his "logismography", there was the systematization of matrix accounting and its application to various "enti economico-amministrativi", enterprises and public sector institutions. Indeed Rossi published in 1889 the fundamental monographic work, Lo schacchiere anglo normanno e la scrittura in partita doppia a forma di scacchiera, The Anglo-Norman Exchequer and the matrix form of double entry bookkeeping, Collegio dei Ragionieri in Roma, the Chartered Accountant Association of Rome. The work . of which only few copies at present is known the existence . reflects the fulfillment of several years of Rossi profound studies in mathematical accounting, examined through the manuscripts of his own collection, donated to the public library of his home town, Reggio Emilia. The scholar is remembered surprisingly more as supporter of the personalistic theory of accounts than as founder of matrix accounting. The fundamental elements of Rossi's innovative accounting, applied both to the double entry bookkeeping and to the "quadruple entry bookkeeping", are recognized and documented in the mathematical studies of the scholar . predominantly in the so-called determinante simbolico, symbolic matrix determinant, and determinante grafico, graphic matrix determinant . and in his historical studies about the English Exchequer . such as the Rotulus annalis and the Memorandum ., from which he derived the title of the volume. The publication of the book raised lively interest both in Italy and in Europe . it is worth to mention, among others, D. Biancardi, P. D'Alvise, E. Gagliardi, F. Hügli, G. Massa, A. Sanguinetti and A. Savigny. The paper, through bibliographic documents and accounting records, intends to plea for the thesis of the originality and innovation of Rossi's accounting tools, confuting the accuse of plagiarism of previous works of Fabio Besta. The paper offers applications of the matrix accounting to business enterprises: first, with a logismographic methodology and second, with a traditional double entry accounting system.

The rendering of accounts by monasteries of different religious orders constitutes one of the most relevant features of monastic accounting. The analysis of accounting systems developed by these institutions throughout their history shows a clear relationship between the informative demands they had and the objective to control a superior organ had. In this paper we will analyse the reach and evolution of the regulation related to the supervision and control of accounts in the Cistercian Order in Castile throughout the chronological period which marks the end of the Old Regime. Therefore, on the one hand we have examined historical documents which have and apply this regulation: the Definiciones Cistercienses de la Sagrada Congregación de San Bernardo y Observancia de Castilla, and on the other a documented series which corresponds to the Book of Statements (Libro de Estados) of one of its institutions, the Monastery of Santa Maria de Oseira, 1614-1832. The analysis of this regulation shows the existence of a regulating frame for account statements based on figures connected to book keeping: internal accounting control and external revision and verification of accounts. Thus demonstrating how important this monastic order considered the development of the instruments of control that allowed it to evaluate the administration of its monastic heritage. The study of the accounting series where this body of rules is developed and interpreted, shows a constant evolution of these rules throughout time. It shows a constant evolution of these oriented toward increasing, clarifying and homogenising information contained in the Book of Statements, constituting an interesting process of normalisation of accounts tied to the unifying and controlling function performed by the superior governmental organ of this Order.

This research presents the historic events of the cost and management accounting over the last 120 years (1885-2005) following authors such as Horngren (1982), Kaplan (1984) y Johnson y Kaplan (1988). Nevertheless, this explanation does not pretend to be exhaustive and closed but it could be extended to deeper studies about another countries and periods. In summary, we can say that the management accounting has been evolved with the changes in the organizing and productive environments of the businesses. In spite of the fact that, since we have news of the existence of the mankind there have been evidences of economic calculation, one must wait until the last third of the 19th century to find regular assignments of the indirect cost to the products and the utilization of indicators for management purposes. Likewise, it has been seen that during the first years of the 20th century there was a period of significant evolution in the management accounting as the result of the apparition of the Movement of the Scientific Direction of the Work by Taylor. The first quarter of the 20th century also supposed an evolution in the management accounting as the result of the creation of multinational businesses. That meant the apparition of new indicators for the assignment of resources. Nevertheless, according to Johnson y Kaplan (1988), from the third decade of the 20th century to the eighties, there has not been a significant evolution due, above all, to the importance given to the financial statements. Nevertheless, Horngren (1982) does not see the period uniformly and identifies three phases in this evolution. A point of inflection has been the organizing and technological changes occurred during the eighties. These have supposed that during the last decade of the 20th century and the first years of the 21st one the management accounting has recovered a new vigour in the research and in the practice. In any case, the lineal presentation of the evidences used here does not mean to be unique. In fact, the diversity of approaches to the historic facts, have supposed the re-emerge of the research in the last decade. In any case, we coincided with Hernández (1996) in the sense that the historic investigation should be supported in primary sources.

After briefly describing the characteristics of the kingdom of Aragon and Catalonia in the 14th century and the most important historical and economic events, this articles goes on to discuss the monastery of Poblet, its creation in 1150 after the count of Barcelona had made a gift of some land and how it evolved until the 15th century when King Peter the Ceremonious appointed the royal almoner, who is the main focus of our study. The royal almoner's manuscripts dating from the end of the 14th century, which record the incomings and outgoings of alms and the ordinances dictated by King Peter 4th, reveal to us how much money he had available to distribute as gifts and also that the people who received these gifts were from nearly all the social classes. Not only were alms given to the needy for food and clothes but also to monasteries, the clergy ? for both physical and mental nourishment (that's to say, food and education)? , female sinners for redemption, pilgrims and even nobles who were on the brink of misfortune. The documents show us how the royal alms were donated, the people who participated (two almoners, two acolytes and an assistant or server), their position in the court ? their privileges and duties? and, most importantly for us, the documents that the administration involved. The documents also show us the process on which the rendering of royal alms accounts was based and how the records were controlled more strictly as the 14th century drew to a close.

The paper offers a succinct survey of analytical-mathematical methods as employed in bookkeeping and accounting during some five millennia. However, the emphasis is on the second half of the 20th century where the use of mathematical ideas, formal concepts and techniques truly flourished. Apart from an increasing use of compound interest and present value calculations, the latter have been greatly refined by introducing probabilistic variables and stochastic models, statistical error terms, etc. (e.g., as encountered in a refinement and extension of the clean surplus theory). But this period (of the last 50 years or so) began rather with deterministic accounting models (that ultimately proved of practical value in the development of computerized spreadsheets and budgeting systems). There also was much experimentation with linear and non-linear algebra (including matrix algebra) and other operation research techniques, as well as with statistical sampling methods for accounting that proved particularly useful in auditing. Yet the crowning intellectual achievement was the slow but impressive development of the "information perspective" of accounting (including information economics, the refined clean surplus theory and mathematical agency theory). These efforts were recently summarized in the two-volume work by Christensen and Feltham (2003, 2005).

José Víctor Arroyo Martín: Archivo Histórico BBVA: un centro para el conocimiento e investigación del mundo de la banca, la economía y la empresa Historical Archive of BBVA: A Center for Knowledge and Research on Banking, Economics and Business

Comentario sobre el libro de Shoichi Sato: "The Merovingian accounting documents of Tours: form and function", Early Medieval Europe, 2000, 9: 143-161.