La Sillografia di Luigi Bianchini (1878): un esempio di contabilità "ermetica" (The Sillografia of Luigi Bianchini (1878): An example of "inscrutable" accounting)

The last decades of the 1800s are recognized by being the most relevant for the development of the Italian accounting. In those years, in Italy, the eager effort of the accountants led to the scientific growth of the discipline and the dignification of the accounting studies and the profession. This historical period has been identified as the "golden age" of accounting since a number of new accounting applications emerged and contributed to a different extent to the above mentioned development of the accounting studies. Among those applications, the "Sillografia" is a particular bookkeeping tool which was consciously designed to be inscrutable, in other terms to prevent third parties from reading and interpreting the accounting status and dynamics of an economic entity such as a firm. Differently from the major bookkeeping techniques at the time, but according to the prescriptions of the Code of Commerce (1865), the "Sillografia" identifies the Journal book as the most relevant accounting book, before the general Ledger. This implied a simplification of the bookkeeping which was only liked to the Journal book and some auxiliary logs but the intrinsic difficulty of having a full perception of the firm assets and performance due to the absence of a direct accounts' systematization in a general Ledger and in a following balance sheet and income statement. Moreover, the most relevant trait of the "Sillografia" is the omission from the bookkeeping in the Journal book of relevant records such as cash, inventories, payables, receivables, and installation costs. While the information related to these records can be inferred indirectly through auxiliary logs, such as the cash account or the creditors and debtors account, the final result is that only the specific accountant who was involved in the bookkeeping (and had the access to auxiliary logs) had the interpretative key to decipher the accounting data and retrace the firm assets and the actual firm performance.