Seeing Double: Can Accountants Foster Revolution?

There's an international effort to factor sustainability into financial reporting. Concurrent with calls for this fundamental reassessment of accounting is the work of an Australian-based writer who has taken one of the rudiments of number crunching – double-entry bookkeeping – and suggested it has a lot to answer for. With her book, Double Entry, Jane Gleeson-White has provoked debate about the merits of a method established more than 500 years ago that remains a standard technique today. She argues that for too long accounting has been oblivious to important intangibles, such as human relationships and the quality of the environment, and she’s sceptical about the seriousness of governments to do something about it.