Canadian Accountant recently ran an interesting article titled: Why you should live your life like an accountant — and how you probably already do.

It’s written by Jack Campbell, a PhD candidate in accounting and accountability at Dublin City University in Ireland. Here are some extracts:

• WHEN asked to think about accounting, most people imagine numbers, calculators, spreadsheets and offices populated by smart-suited bean counters hunched over reports. You most certainly think about money. 
• But by breaking away from this image and reclaiming the term “accountant” to speak to a wider number of everyday activities, we can understand the vital, often positive role accounting plays in our lives. 
• …Alongside the dominant definition that refers to managing finances, another one has developed, by which accounting is understood more broadly as “the language by which people justify their behaviour” to others. Accounting in this sense isn’t just counting (although it is still that), but also measuring, recording, explaining, justifying, evaluating. Accounting becomes the giving of accounts — and something we already do in our everyday lives. 
• …Yet we can take an everyday accounting even further, beyond the sums. Aristotle also conceived of his economics as the general managing of relationships, as a form of “social accounting”. In fact, if we think about why we account in any circumstance, it’s for this reason. Even when we account in a financial sense — when a company publishes its financial statements — it does so primarily to ensure the shareholders that their money is being well spent by those who run the business. From this perspective, accounting is not about money, but about communication between people and in the interests of transparency. 
• With this understanding of accounting as a form of communication, we can begin to think about the wider forms of accounting that we all do in our everyday lives. When we review a product we bought online, or when we are asked to justify our actions in the workplace during a performance review, aren’t we practising this form of accounting? 

He concludes:

• …we account to foster, nurture or reckon with the relationships we have with each other. 
• This may also clarify the link between accounting and accountability. When we give accounts — especially when someone expects us to give an account — then it is often because that person wants to hold us to account. Justifying our actions is not done for nothing. And in being asked to justify our actions – or asking someone else to do so — we’re at least in part implying that they have something to reckon for. 
• Yet, realizing what we do as a form of everyday accounting can also reveal our positive interdependencies. When we listen to songs together at a concert, or save up for a holiday with our friends, we’re accounting in ways which connect us with each other. These are accounts which are about hope, love, friendship. Accounting isn’t just about being held to account, then, but bringing us into closer relation with those around us. 
• So, accounting is not only the domain of accountants. Yes, there are professionals whose job it is to prepare company accounts. But by only considering accounting in this narrow sense, we miss how much of our everyday activities are based on it. Accounting is, at heart, a form of communication, and we are all everyday accountants. We just need to remember it. 

It’s always valuable to be reminded that accounting has little value if it fails in communicating something potentially useful, and it’s even more thought-provoking to have that placed in a broader context. It’s only fair to point out though that accounting of the kind described should logically reveal negative interdependencies as effectively as positive ones. Campbell is knowingly simplifying things in saying that a company publishes financial statements “primarily to ensure the shareholders that their money is being well spent by those who run the business.” The conceptual framework certainly specifies that information about the efficiency and effectiveness of management’s use of an entity’s economic resources is useful in various respects, but much of cutting-edge corporate activity is characterized by wildly speculative expenditure to an extent that renders the term “well spent” somewhat quaint. That’s not generally a problem for stakeholders it seems, as long as the irrationality of the stock price continues to outpace that of the entity itself…

More broadly, Campbell’s thoughts reminded me of Werner Herzog’s distinction, which I’ve mentioned before, between “a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants,” and a “deeper strata of… poetic, ecstatic truth (which) is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.” (Herzog referred back to this in his recent documentary Ghost Elephants, commenting of a potentially valuable piece of photographic evidence that it only provides an “accountants’ truth at best.”) That is, it’s questionable whether one would better appreciate the experience of listening to live music with a friend by conceiving of it as a form of accounting; on the contrary, such a framing might seem to serve as a form of constraint on a more purely emotional engagement. Looked at that way, while accounting (whether of the financial or broader kind) might be a necessary component of our social infrastructure, the best indication of successful accounting in a given situation might be that no one involved is thinking about accounting…

The opinions expressed are solely those of the author.