There is a popular idea that accounting is a difficult, complex and unfathomable discipline; that only those who take up several years of intensive training in the subject can hope to understand it fully; that the rest of us are condemned to an uncomfortably superficial familiarity with a few of the terms and fewer still of the concepts. This idea can be inadvertently reinforced by the well-meaning attempts of practising accountants to explain accounting to laymen such as ourselves.

These explanations are often couched in the inner language of accounting: debits and credits, T-accounts and double-entry, journals and ledgers, assets and liabilities. These are no doubt proffered by way of kindly explanation, but they often create barriers to understanding more severe than the original incomprehension itself. Furthermore, many of the standard accounting texts are subject to the same criticism, in that they frequently fail to distinguish between practice and principle.

This failure to sift the essence from the detail, the fundamental from the superficial, is, I think, the main reason for the mystique which surrounds accounting. For the truth is that accounting, far from representing an esoteric order of great profundity, is an extremely simple and straightforward system which is very much easier to understand than, say, a central heating diagram, or a knitting pattern, or an old-fashioned crystal radio set.