Accounting for One’s Action
In a dream … walking along a High Street, embedded in every shop-door, a flat-screen display showing the live accounts for the business inside. Discrete but clearly indicated, one column for income and expenditure, next to it the balance sheet–each moment: the life blood of the business made visible.

Is accounting really so far from daily life? What if we informed ourselves about the economic circumstances around us, rather than leaving it to happenstance or an invisible hand? The cost of living …, next year’s pay rise …, the price of housing …it’s all to be found in the numbers. A set of accounts tells a story; the business narrative; the book in which the economy becomes visible. Some prefer not to look, thinking that life is complicated enough already. Why lift the bonnet?

The dream continues … at the end of the High Street I come to a building, it looks like a transparent temple: as I draw nearer I see the glass walls flashing up hundreds of transactions between all the businesses and showing the dynamic movement between accounts. Inside a meeting going on. I realise this is a bank.
What is accounting really about? Hiding money from the taxman? Painting a rosy picture for your financial backers? Or could it be that it is only by accounting that we can become economically awake, individually and socially.