Pioneering the Electronic Spreadsheet: Educational and Practical Implications as well as Analytical Background

Richard Mattessich

Synopsis

Just as the application of statistical sampling and testing is, in our century, claimed to be the major practical achievement in Auditing, so is the advent of the electronic spreadsheet often considered the major practical innova-tion for Accounting. But how did the electronic (i.e., computerized) spreadsheet of business accounting come about? Are popular computer books (like Bill Gates' The Road Ahead, p. 50) correct in asserting that com-pu-ter ex-perts were the original inventors of the electronic spreadsheet? Many accountants know better--e.g., Thornton (1985, p.137), Whittington (1995, p. 147), Gaffikin (1996, p. 102-103), Murphy (1997, p. 405)--and have pointed out that Mattessich's work (1961, 1964a, 1964b) pioneered electronic spreadsheets. Indeed, Mattes-sich's book Si-mu-lation of the Firm through a Computer Budget Program (1964b) contains no less than 48 compu-ter-ized spread-sheets, covering an entire accounting system (including numerous budgets as well as an income state-ment and two balance sheets) some 15 years before Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston presented the best-selling spread-sheet pro-gram, VisiCalc. The contrary assertion does not diminish the immense merit of the later program, but it rejects the historically incorrect claim that these computer experts invented and first used computerized spread-sheets. It also removes the confusion of exclusively identifying the term "electronic spreadsheet" with "VisiCalc" and subsequent programmes. However, it is not to be denied that only after 1979, in the wake of the wide use of Personal Computers, did the electronic spreadsheet begin to become truly popular. Before this time (i.e., from 1964 to 1979) it was--apart from occasi-onal use in main-frame computers--mainly an educational tool. It taught students the interconnection of accounting variables, the interdependence through which the change of a few variables or parameters might change most of the other variables; it also demonstrated the immensely grater efficiency of revising periodic budgets by means of elec-tronic spreadsheets (in comparison to "manual" budget revisions).

But perhaps the most important educational feature of these publications was to reveal to students and accounting practitioners the mathematical structure and analytical background of accounting. Mattessich's Accounting and Analytical Methods (1964a), for example, not only contains (in Chapter 9, pp. 347-408) a comprehensive accounting-budgeting model, it shows, step by step, how to construct one, and even more importantly, it does not get stuck in technical details but considers the implications of analytical models and methods for accounting in general. It presented, for example (in its Appendix A, pp. 437-465), a set-theoretical system of assumptions with rigorous proofs of a series of accounting theorems that previously were taught to students by mere illustrations. Indeed, the widespread use of Accounting and Analytical Methods in graduate courses of accounting during the second half of the 1960s and the 1970s seems to have contributed to the initiation and spread of analytical methods in the curriculum and research of our discipline. And few will deny that such methods have had a major impact on modern academic accounting education (for bibliographical references, see text of the complete Nomination).

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