Prospective Adventures in Accounting Ideas.

Abstract This article focuses on the prospective adventures in Accounting ideas. Almost the whole of the development of accounting ideas as they are today relevant has occurred within the lifetime of the Association and in that development members of the Association have played a prominent and honored part. Without belittling the record or the massive endeavors of many, one cannot here name, we can usefully look at a few ideas, a few cases in which men have thought greatly of accounting. These fifty years have seen quite a few potentially fruitful ideas, with wide implications, brought to notice, noticed scarcely at all and almost abandoned. This was an adventurous exercise, novel in the literature. At the same time he roundly criticized some of them. This too was rather bold. But though the intervening years have provided outstanding illustrations of the inadequacy of these assumptions, substantially the same assumptions underlie today's accounting. According to the author, accounting could become a real language of business finance instead of a mass of only vaguely understood and only vaguely understandable symbols.