47 Bookkeeping Quotes to Unlock Financial Success

By Norbert Juma

Master quote curator and editor on a mission to inspire

Published October 6, 2023

These bookkeeping quotes will teach you about the importance of maintaining good financial records and how to do it easily.

Bookkeeping is a method of managing and maintaining a record of financial transactions.

It involves tracking income, expenses, debts, and assets.

Proper bookkeeping offers a clear, honest picture of a financial situation so that you can make informed decisions with your money.

As you’ll see from the quotes below, some people enjoy bookkeeping while others find it intolerable.

While everyone manages their finances differently, practicing some form of bookkeeping is always a good idea so you can make the best possible decisions for yourself and your future.

Keep reading to learn more about bookkeeping, and tell us your favorite bookkeeping quote in the comment section below!

The Principles of Bookkeeping

Here are a few key principles of bookkeeping:

Timeliness
Double-Entry
Proper Organization
Consistency and Accuracy

Timeliness

Bookkeeping should be done in a timely manner.

It allows offering the current financial information whenever required.

In case of a delay, one could face issues like confusion and errors while maintaining financial records.

Double-Entry

Bookkeeping relies on a popular mechanism known as “Double Entry.”

This suggests that each transaction relates to at least two accounts.

This means for a debited amount, there must be an equal credit amount in another entry.

Proper Organization

Effective bookkeeping demands proper organization.

Hence, all the transactions must be recorded and classified systematically.

For this purpose, a standardized chart of accounts is created.

It offers a better analysis of financial data.

Consistency and Accuracy

Bookkeeping requires maintaining the best possible consistency and accuracy of financial records.

It involves regular review and analysis of financial data regularly.

As a result, it is much easier to identify even minor errors and discrepancies.

Top 10 Bookkeeping Quotes about Life

Here are the top ten quotes about bookkeeping in life.

1. “I get so tired of moral bookkeeping.” — Katherine Anne Porter

2. “I don’t really enjoy finance and accounting.” — Holly Branson

3. “Accounting was the course that helped me more than anything.” — Julian Robertson

4. “Almost all decisions based on cost accounting are utterly wrong.” — Eliyahu Goldratt

5. “The ideal scientist thinks like a poet and works like a bookkeeper.” — E. O. Wilson

6. “The earnings of a poet could be reckoned by a metaphysician rather than a bookkeeper.” — Edward Dahlberg

7. “Every actor is somewhat mad, or else he’d be a plumber or a bookkeeper or a salesman.” — Bela Lugosi

8. “Be the Mick Jagger of the mailroom, the Warren Buffet of bookkeeping and the Bono of stapler selling.” — Jen Sincero

9. “Making good judgments when one has complete data, facts, and knowledge is not leadership – it’s bookkeeping.” — Dee Hock

10. “There were no object lessons, and the studies of bookkeeping and French were pursued (but never effectually overtaken.” — H. G. Wells

Bookkeeping Quotes On Accounting & Accountants

These quotes highlight the importance of accounting, but also it’s limitations to make things happen.

11. “Capital isn’t this pile of money sitting somewhere; it’s an accounting construct.” — Bethany McLean

12. “There’s no business like show business, but there are several businesses like accounting.” — David Letterman

13. “Balanced budget requirements seem more likely to produce accounting ingenuity than genuinely balanced budgets.” — Thomas Sowell

14. “You have to know to account. It’s the language of practical business life. It was a very useful thing to deliver to civilization.” — Charlie Munger

15. “Over the long haul of life on this planet, it is the ecologists, and not the bookkeepers of business, who are the ultimate accountants.” — Stewart Udall

16. “Don’t ever let your business get ahead of the financial side of your business. Accounting, accounting, accounting. Know your numbers.” — Tilman J. Fertitta

17. “You know, the only way I’ve found to make these pictures is with animators. You can’t seem to do it with accountants and bookkeepers.” — Walt Disney

18. “When economists speak of money, they neglect that all money and credit is debt. That is the essence of bookkeeping and accounting.” — Michael Hudson

19. “Accounting does not make corporate earnings or balance sheets more volatile. Accounting just increases the transparency of volatility in earnings.” — Diane Garnick

20. “Lottie did everything the old-fashioned way, including the bookkeeping, which was fine with me since I knew nothing about accounting software anyway. To me, spreadsheets were what I did on Saturday mornings after washing my bed linen.” — Kate Collins

Bookkeeping Quotes About Bookkeepers

Bookkeepers tirelessly maintain accurate financial records.

22. “Of necessity, we made the discovery that it is easier to turn poets into business journalists than to turn bookkeepers into writers.” — Henry R. Luce

23. “The demand for good bookkeepers is at an all-time high as more people make the leap into self-employment each year and need competent bookkeeping help.” — Sylvia Jaumann

24. “We value virtue but do not discuss it. The honest bookkeeper, the faithful wife, the earnest scholar get little of our attention compared to the embezzler, the tramp, the cheat.” — John Steinbeck

25. “I am writing to apply for the position of bookkeeper. Attached, you will find my list of qualifications. I have been keeping books for four years now, and I am never going to give them back.” — Joey Comeau

26. “Women occupy, in great masses, the ‘household tasks’ of industry. They are nurses but not doctors, secretaries but not executives, researchers but not writers, workers but not managers, bookkeepers but not promoters.” — Vivian Gornick

27. “Their educations ended with high school – my father going to work as a clerk and then salesman in a company dealing in printing and stationary, and my mother working as a secretary and then bookkeeper in a firm of wool merchants.” — Martin Lewis Perl

28. “The CEO era gave rise to the CFO (not certified flying object, as you might imagine, but chief financial officer) and, most recently, the CIO, chief investment officer, a nice boost for the bookkeeper you can’t afford to give a raise . . .” — William Safire

29. “Any small business owner wears many hats. We [New View Window Cleaning] are the salesman, bookkeeper, scheduler, cleaner, customer complaint department, etc. If you aren’t organized and willing to do all these things (at least in the beginning), you are better off working for someone.” — Tony Evans

30. “If the unusual never happened, there would be no difference in people, and then there wouldn’t be any fun in life. The game would become merely a matter of addition and subtraction. It would make of us a race of bookkeepers with plodding minds.” — Jesse Lauriston Livermore

Bookkeeping Quotes On Double Entry & Ledger

Double-entry and ledgers could be considered a high form of art, as these quotes convey.

31. “Go is to Western chess what philosophy is to double-entry accounting.” — Trevanian

32. “One could argue that double-entry bookkeeping was one of history’s great advances.” — Charlie Munger

33. “Capitalism and double entry bookkeeping are absolutely indissociable; their relationship to each other is that of form to content.” — Werner Sombart

34. “Datini’s meticulously kept account books span almost fifty years and clearly show the transition from single- to double-entry bookkeeping. ” — Jane Gleeson-White

35. “Be prepared for the creation of an intrusive bureaucracy to police the ordinance by examining the books and payroll ledgers of businesses.” — Randy Hamilton

36. “Few have heard of Fra Luca Pacioli, the inventor of double-entry bookkeeping; but he has probably had much more influence on human life than has Dante or Michelangelo.” — Herbert J. Muller

37. “You are asked to keep a ledger – a small notebook will do – of money in and money out. Counting brings clarity, and clarity is one of the first and finest fruits of prosperity.” — Julia Cameron

38. “The system of book-keeping by double entry is, perhaps, the most beautiful one in the wide domain of literature or science. Were it less common, it would be the admiration of the learned world.” — Edwin T. Freedley

39. “All the creditors must appear in the ledger at the right-hand side, and all the debtors at the left. All entries made in the ledger have to be double entries – that is, if you make one creditor, you must make someone debtor” — Luca Pacioli

40. “Markets are as old as the crossroads. But capitalism, as we know it, is only a few hundred years old, enabled by cooperative arrangements and technologies, such as the joint-stock ownership company, shared liability insurance, double-entry bookkeeping.” — Howard Rheingold

More Bookkeeping Quotes

Here are a few more bookkeeping quotes about its pervasiveness in most areas of life.

41. “Art has been hijacked by nonartists. It’s been taken over by bookkeeping. The whole thing is so corrupt.” — Elaine De Kooning

42. “Making good judgments when one has complete data, facts, and knowledge is not leadership – it’s bookkeeping.” — Dee Hock

43. “Don’t try to become a teacher overnight with psychological bookkeeping in your heart and educational theory in your head.” — Janusz Korczak

44. “Yet we can be sure that whatever fictions exist in Wall Street bookkeeping, the earth is a faithful scribe, a faultless calculator, a superb bookkeeper; we will be held responsible for every bit of our economic folly.” — Thomas Berry

45. “For a scientist must indeed be freely imaginative and yet skeptical, creative and yet a critic. There is a sense in which he must be free, but another in which his thought must be very precisely regimented; there is poetry in science, but also a lot of bookkeeping.” — Peter Medawar

46. “Comparatively, we are so much quicker to return favors and to pay our debts to mortals – and we should be responsive and grateful. But what of Him who gave us mortal life itself, who will ere long give us all immortality, and who proffers to the faithful the greatest gift of all, eternal life? We are poor bookkeepers, indeed!” — Neal A. Maxwell

47. “Private property works like circuitry in electronics or piping in hydraulics. It conveys wages to the owners of labor power, as well as the various forms of nonwage property income to the owners of capital. In itself, it is no more responsible for maldistribution of purchasing power than the science of bookkeeping is responsible for bankruptcy.” — Louis O. Kelso