The Ledgers
As Philip Gaskell commented in his article, "The Strahan Papers,"
the account books which Strahan kept for his business show part of the
reason for his success, for they are remarkably thorough and accurate
examples of bookkeeping.[3] Since the
beginning of this century, when Richard Austen-Leigh wrote the first full
book on Strahan, The Story of a Printing House,[4] these business records have been
known
generically as the "Ledgers" of William Strahan. And since 1950 and 1953,
when William B. Todd first obtained permission to microfilm the records,
the volumes have been designated in alphabetical sequence, which is less
awkward than the numbering subsequently affixed to them by the British
Museum.
These so-called "Ledgers" show that William Strahan was a trained
bookkeeper whose practices in double entry bookkeeping followed standard
procedure as put forth in contemporary textbooks. The businessman first
made out the "waste book" and put it in daily use. This waste book allowed
the merchant to record transactions immediately and fully, but it had the
defect of preventing the merchant's finding any particular transaction
quickly, because the book was not arranged by name but by date.
This defect had led merchants, at an earlier stage of bookkeeping, to
adopt the Italian practice of double entry, which is simply that for every
entry in the chronological waste book, there would be two entries, debit and
credit, in the final ledger. This division of entries could be incorporated
into the waste book if such was considered practical, but the task was
complex and would lead to error. Therefore, a third, intermediate, book
had come into use: the journal, which separated the debtors and creditors
before they were placed alphabetically in the final ledger. When the waste
book was "digested into form" and put in the journal, it was recommended
that the merchant put a check mark opposite the original entry when he had
finished dividing it, to prevent posting twice or omitting. Strahan's
procedure was an alternative method of putting a large X through the entire
entry, although he also used check marks at times.
It was recommended that a ledger be started by titling each set of
pages for the accounts, in roughly the same order as their first appearance
in the waste book, and then writing out an "alphabet" at the front of the
book for easy reference.
Because Strahan was actively engaged in daily business, he did not
follow current bookkeeping texts with slavish exactness; in fact, the
texts themselves frown on such an idea. Strahan's entries were quite
detailed by contemporary standards, and he followed the basic procedures
outlined above; but his personal additions to standard practice were that he
used the new idea of keeping several books of primary entry rather than
only one kind of waste book, that he balanced by yearly totals, that he used
self-balancing cash entries (in Ledgers H and I), and that he kept at least
one columnar cash book (Ledger P). In addition to these up-to-date
practices, he followed the relatively new practice of "journalizing," or
dividing entries by debit and credit while they were still in the single entry
format of a waste book (Ledgers B and C).
The "Ledgers" are tabulated below in bookkeeping terms. Four
volumes from the American Philosophical Society Library in Philadelphia
have been added to the twelve in the British Museum so that the reader can
see the complete alphabetical listing: the extension of Todd's system to
include all separate volumes of Strahan's records which were written during
his lifetime.[5]
The sequence of derivation of these ledgers is quite plainly seen in
their overlapping entries. Ledger C, which was found tucked inside Ledger
B, is a waste book for B, which is itself an intermediate form of a partially
separated waste book. The entries in B were transferred to Ledgers A and
D, and to another ledger which has not survived. Thus the sequential
Ledgers A and D are augmented by B, which is partially derived from
C.
The sequential Ledgers D and F are augmented by information in G,
which is a journal for D, F, and a missing ledger called "my little quarto
book" by Strahan. Ledger F is duplicated for the first nine years by Ledger
E, which could therefore be called a journal or a ledger, but
is
useless for study because it is an exact duplicate of F as far
as
it goes.
Ledgers A, D and F, then, evidently do not show us all of Strahan's
business transactions even though they form an unbroken series of entries
from 1738 to 1790; it is obvious, however, that they record most of the
transactions in the private business, and that they are augmented by B, C
and G. Any generalizations about Strahan's printing practices must be based
on a study of at least Ledgers A, D, F, with the desirable addition of
control data from B.
In transferring entries from one book to another, Strahan was faced,
as are other bookkeepers, with the difficulty of making sure that all of the
entries were copied. In his method of double checking lies the reason for
the otherwise mysterious "misplacing" of dates in the ledgers. The second
time he went through a volume, Strahan would pick up overlooked entries
and post them out of chronological order at the foot of the
proper page in the new volume. As long as he got the entry on the correct
page for the account, Strahan was following a standard method of
procedure; therefore, a lack of chronological sequence on a page is not to
be considered a mistake. It follows from this information that a reader must
interpret the dates on any given page by referring to the context of the
entire page rather than a simple sequence of entries.
Strahan's method of writing down the day, month and year in the
entries must also be made clear if the reader wants reliable information. All
dating by Strahan is New Style and each entry is dated, but the exact day
or month is frequently "understood." Just as Strahan does not clutter the
page by repeating press runs if they are the same, entry after entry, so also
he dates in groups; therefore, any entry is to be considered
as
dated by the closest date above it if it is not specifically and separately
dated.
Dating was not so important to Strahan as it is to his
twentieth-century readers since he knew he would not be paid in a brief
time. It is a rare entry on the credit side of Strahan's ledgers which is not
at least six months later than the corresponding debit. There was no need
to bill a customer the instant his work was finished, nor was there any
reason to bill the customers separately for each job. In addition, because of
Strahan's billing method of including all extra charges, binding charges,
distribution and publishing charges in the final version of any given set of
entries, it is obvious that any given set was written into the final ledger as
a unit as soon after the entire job was completed as was
practical. On this series of inferences, I base my conclusion that the dating
of the ledgers should be considered as the times when one or a group of
jobs was billed to the customer after delivery: when the entries were
transferred to journals (or ledgers), the entire
information about extra charges was gathered and included, and the bills
were sent out, dated with the dates which have survived in the
ledgers.
Several of the ledgers were designed to be examined by the customers
involved in the accounts. We know that some customers came in to
Strahan's shop, looked over their accounts in the ledger, probably haggled
a bit, and then paid their debt, because these customers signed jointly with
Strahan directly on the page of the ledger. On some of these occasions
Strahan would lower the total bill by as much as a pound (rarely more).
The practice, which is still in operation today, was called "abating" by
Strahan when he noted it at the bottom of an account. There seem to have
been three reasons for "abating": to make an even pound for a customer
who brought cash, to give a rebate for prompt payment, or to forestall
argument by lowering the price a token amount for a disgruntled customer
as a sign of good faith.
Strahan conducted a successful business on the basis of the highly
codified entries in the ledgers. Once the consistency of the codification and
its strict reliance on conventional bookkeeping are understood, the reader
can see that the ledger entries are completely reliable even though they need
interpretation. We shall now turn to a discussion of the content of the
entries, to see what can be learned from them about the organization of
Strahan's printing house.
