PREFACE 



From the literature on the subject, nearly all of which 

 has been published during the last five or six years, one 

 might be led to think there was something strange and 

 uncommon about the keeping of records of business trans- 

 actions on the farm. In the last several years, many rec- 

 ord books and bulletins on farm bookkeeping and farm 

 costs have been published. With very few exceptions 

 these bulletins deal with the subject from a purely statis- 

 tical point of view, without involving principles of double 

 entry bookkeeping or the fundamentals of accounting the- 

 ory. Very often they fail to provide for proper correla- 

 tion and interpretation of results after they are obtained. 

 These bulletins have proved to be of considerable value, 

 however, in creating a desire on the part of the farmer for 

 a better knowledge concerning his financial condition and 

 progress. 



Perhaps the reason the subject is considered in the 

 bulletins from the statistical viewpoint only is found in the 

 fact that double entry bookkeeping has been treated so 

 often in the past as a weird and difficult subject unrelated 

 to anything else, requiring familiarity with a great many 

 rules and the use of a great amount of time to operate. 

 Naturally this would not appeal to the farmer returning 

 from a hard day's work. 



It has been the intention, herein, to present the princi- 

 ples of bookkeeping from the common sense viewpoint 



