1. "It doesn’t matter if an asset is cash or an asset bought with cash, what defines an asset is value. Basically, if it has value, it’s an asset.” [150 highlighters]
   
2. "Accounting, like my silverware drawer, is simply a way to organize information to tell a meaningful story and make better informed business decisions.” [145 highlighters]
   
3. “Equity represents the owner’s share of the assets once all of the liabilities have been met. The amount of equity is calculated as the leftover amount, or residual.” [124 highlighters]
   
4. “You must always have two effects on the storyboard: both effects may be increases, both may be decreases, or one an increase and one a decrease." [105 highlighters]
   
5. “Assets are valuable, we can measure what they cost us, and they will bring benefits to our business as we use them in the future. Assets can be used directly or indirectly by the business to earn money." [98 highlighters]
   

What was your favourite snippet?

- Mark Robilliard, Color Accounting International

It was especially nice to be teaching  a business finance class in Lugano recently, at Franklin College.   The college is picturesque, the students bright and the city magnificent – nestled around a lake in in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland.  Lugano is historically and regionally connected to the northern Italian towns of Milan and Venice.  And of course Venice is where Luca Pacioli, the so-called father of modern accounting, wrote his treatise on the subject that is the first known formal description of the art.

As a friend of Leonardo da Vinci and with a shared appreciation of color and perspective, I wondered what Pacioli would have thought of Color Accounting and how it augments the system he described. I bet he would have appreciated that the human mind processes color faster than sides, and that the addition of color makes accounting easier to understand.