bookkeeping

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. The practice or profession of recording the accounts and transactions of a business.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. The art of recording pecuniary transactions in a regular and systematic manner; the art of keeping accounts in such a manner as to give a permanent record of business transactions from which the true state or history of one's pecuniary affairs or mercantile dealings may at any time be ascertained. Properly kept books show what a merchant has, what he owes, and what is owing to him, as well as what sums he has received and paid, the losses he has incurred, etc. Books are kept according to one of two chief methods, viz., by single or by double entry. The former is more simple and less perfect than the latter, and is now in use chiefly in retail business. In bookkeeping by single entry, three books, a day-book, a cash-book, and a ledger, are commonly used, but the essential book is the ledger, containing accounts under the names of the persons with whom a trader deals, goods or money received from any one of them being entered on one side of the account, called the credit side, and goods sold or money paid to that person being entered on the opposite or debit side of the account. In bookkeeping by double entry, the ledger accounts are of two kinds, personal accounts such as those just described, and book-accounts, in which the commodities dealt in are made the subjects of separate accounts, and have a debit and a credit side, as in personal accounts. Thus, if a trader purchase 100 bales of cotton from A. B., the account in the ledger headed A. B. is credited with 100 bales of cotton, so much, while the account headed Cotton is debited with the same quantity and amount; should the trader sell 10 bales to C. D., the account headed C. D. is debited with 10 bales at so much, and the account headed Cotton is credited with 10 bales; and so on. These book-accounts are based on the principle that all money and articles received become debtors to him from whom or to that for which they are received, and, on the other hand, all those who receive money or goods from us become debtors to cash or to the goods. In this way every transaction is entered in the ledger on the creditor side of one account and on the debtor side of another. The books used in double entry vary in number and arrangement according to the nature of the business and the manner of recording the facts. Transactions as they take place from day to day are generally recorded in such books as the stock-book, cash-book, bill-book, invoice-book, and sales-book, or they may all be recorded in order in a waste-book or day-book. Upon these books or additional documents are based the journal and ledger. The former contains a periodical abstract of all the transactions recorded in the subordinate books or in documents not entered in these, classified into debits and credits, while the latter contains an abstract of all the entries made in the former, classified under the heads of their respective accounts.

Wiktionary

1. n. Accounting: the skill or practice of keeping books or systematic records of financial transactions, e.g. income and expenses.
2. v. present participle of bookkeep.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. The art of recording pecuniary or business transactions in a regular and systematic manner, so as to show their relation to each other, and the state of the business in which they occur; the art of keeping accounts. The books commonly used are a daybook, cashbook, journal, and ledger. See daybook, cashbook, journal, and ledger.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. the activity of recording business transactions