What Italian mathematician is considered the father of accounting?

What Italian mathematician is considered the father of accounting? Luca Pacioli is widely considered the father of accounting.

Pacioli was a Franciscan friar and mathematician from Sansepolcro, Tuscany. His importance comes chiefly from Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni et proportionalita, published in Venice in 1494. The book included the first known printed description of the double-entry bookkeeping system used by Italian merchants.

Pacioli did not invent double-entry bookkeeping. The method was already used in medieval Italy, and Benedetto Cotrugli described it in a manuscript earlier. Pacioli’s distinction is that he codified and widely disseminated the method in accessible vernacular Italian, helping standardize practices that remain recognizable today.

He is sometimes confused with Leonardo da Vinci because the two collaborated in Milan, and Leonardo illustrated Pacioli’s work on mathematical proportion. However, Leonardo was not the figure associated with the founding of modern bookkeeping.