Ancient Accounting

[Reeve]

So I'm sitting here doing cost estimations for Seismic Crews. A few thousand people, food, lodging, production estimations, etc. It's really very complicated to work out, but it's possible, because I have Excel, Telephones, Email, etc. I can get quotes from people quickly, get operational estimates from experts, and plug all the numbers into a model to work out a cost.

Now I'm imagining big military campaigns of the ancient Roman world. According to some of the ancient sources, armies could number upwards of 80,000 soldiers, who had to be equipped, fed, sheltered, etc. for open-ended campaigns that could span years in unknown circumstances. The cost model/accounting would have to be done on paper, without double-entry bookkeeping. It would be done in Roman Numerals, where the person would have to figure they had MMMDMCDLVIII available loaves of bread per granary available to feed MLCVIII or whatever soldiers per unit and would have to do that crappy math. Finally, they'd have to copy their records/projections on many pieces of paper so that they could send it out by horse to all the important personnel who needed the information.

How the hell do you manage such a massive operation in real time under those conditions? It's hard enough for me with modern tools. It's hard to imagine under Roman conditions.

[Deleted]

So I'm sitting here doing cost estimations for Seismic Crews. A few thousand people, food, lodging, production estimations, etc. It's really very complicated to work out, but it's possible, because I have Excel, Telephones, Email, etc. I can get quotes from people quickly, get operational estimates from experts, and plug all the numbers into a model to work out a cost.

Now I'm imagining big military campaigns of the ancient Roman world. According to some of the ancient sources, armies could number upwards of 80,000 soldiers, who had to be equipped, fed, sheltered, etc. for open-ended campaigns that could span years in unknown circumstances. The cost model/accounting would have to be done on paper, without double-entry bookkeeping. It would be done in Roman Numerals, where the person would have to figure they had MMMDMCDLVIII available loaves of bread per granary available to feed MLCVIII or whatever soldiers per unit and would have to do that crappy math. Finally, they'd have to copy their records/projections on many pieces of paper so that they could send it out by horse to all the important personnel who needed the information.

How the hell do you manage such a massive operation in real time under those conditions? It's hard enough for me with modern tools. It's hard to imagine under Roman conditions.

I think about this quite a bit. Even doing accounts before sage existed T_T I can't imagine keeping track of stuff with ACTUAL sales and purchase ledgers.

I think it was just all done on abacuses though. You just kept track of what you had where using abacuses and like, had to make sure that when you spent something, you removed it from elsewhere. It still all makes sense, there just isn't as much scope for checking everything is correct. When you think about it, the double entry bookkeeping is mostly just an imaginary system that makes it easier to keep track of everything (like, if stuff doesn't balance, it's pretty simple to figure out that you've forgotern to, say, credit SLCA) and the only real problem would be like, say you spend £100 on new spears for your guys, and forget to make a note of it, you'll think you have £100 more than you actually do. If you are careful to keep track of stuff though, shouldn't cause issues.

[Tileyfa]

Would the Romans even bothered figuring that stuff out? If they ran short, wouldn't they just take what they needed from the locals? Well, I guess payroll for soldiers would need figured out, but that was probably based on months served.

[poser765]

Would the Romans even bothered figuring that stuff out? If they ran short, wouldn't they just take what they needed from the locals? Well, I guess payroll for soldiers would need figured out, but that was probably based on months served.

80k soldiers moving through an area drains the locals food pretty damn fast. Without a supply train and solid logistics feeding an army is not an easy thing to do.

Great strategies and tactics don't win wars. Logistics win wars.

[Reeve]

Would the Romans even bothered figuring that stuff out? If they ran short, wouldn't they just take what they needed from the locals? Well, I guess payroll for soldiers would need figured out, but that was probably based on months served.

It would be absolutely insane to go to war without some sense of whether or not you had the resources necessary to carry out the campaign, or if in success you would bankrupt the empire. There had to be some sort of cost/resource estimation process, and some sort of planning process to determine what portion of your economy would have to devote itself to supporting the troops and how you would manage to fund that.

Armies can only do so much on foraging alone, particularly in enemy territory.

[Puupi]

Maybe you are overcomplicating the issue.

I would assume they associated lots of stuff to each other instead of calculating everything.

Just like nowadays when you think of two cars. You think it's two cars, not 8 wheels, 18242 bolts, 5282 screws, 2 turning wheels etc..

So that 80k soldiers was split into segments of units which all included the required stuff in smaller numbers. So if one "unit" was missing two swords, because of whatever reason, it doesn't matter in the big picture. If all calculations had been done on micro and macro level at the same time, a small miscalculation could lead to serious troubles (eg. missing 20% of swords of all soldiers instead of missing 20% of swords of one unit of 10 men).

I believe they had to split everything into segments that had numbers easy enough to grasp. That's how military works even today. Army group->corps->army->division->brigade->regiment->battalion->company->platoon->squad->fireteam->pair->soldier

[Elegiac]

Maybe you are overcomplicating the issue.

I would assume they associated lots of stuff to each other instead of calculating everything.

Just like nowadays when you think of two cars. You think it's two cars, not 8 wheels, 18242 bolts, 5282 screws, 2 turning wheels etc..

So that 80k soldiers was split into segments of units which all included the required stuff in smaller numbers. So if one "unit" was missing two swords, because of whatever reason, it doesn't matter in the big picture. If all calculations had been done on micro and macro level at the same time, a small miscalculation could lead to serious troubles (eg. missing 20% of swords of all soldiers instead of missing 20% of swords of one unit of 10 men).

I believe they had to split everything into segments that had numbers easy enough to grasp. That's how military works even today. Army group->corps->army->division->brigade->regiment->battalion->company->platoon->squad->fireteam->pair

There still has to be someone at the top administering the administrators. That's how a bureaucracy works.

[XDurionX]

Even back then standing armies of 80.000 soldiers were not a trivial thing. Most soldiers had "regular" jobs as well. And i don´t think they thought in the precision of our time, they didn´t know they had 43687 loafs of bread of 800g each, they knew they had a storeroom that would last for 6-7 months. And if somebody got a smaller share he wouldn´t file a lawsuit like nowadays. It´s all about precision and granularity, and a "sink-or-swim"-mentality. If it worked, fine, if it didn´t, poor little soldier i´ll never get to see.

[Puupi]

There still has to be someone at the top administering the administrators. That's how a bureaucracy works.

Yeah and only thing he needs to know is that there is "one army".

[Deleted]

id imagine by a lot of guesswork and handwaving

[Gheld]

They probably left the logistics up to the ranking officers. Lots of soldiers means lots of ranking officers to control them...with accounting!

[Deleted]

Romans made unbelievably complex architectural buildings without computers to do the maths.

If they can construct monumental palaces, colosseums and a harbor the size of a small city, then don't you think its pretty doable for them to figure out how much it would cost to send troops up north? They where masters of strategie, so they probably had a good system to figure out how much bread they needed to keep the soldiers well fed.

And as someone pointed out, there number system is only viable with small numbers, so they probably tried to use the smallest possible numbers.

It would actually be pretty interesting to see their engineers and logistics at work, today we need a calculator to figure out what the price of our groceries is, I think we could learn a thing or 2 from the ancients, maybe they used maths in a way that we can't because of our arabic numbers?

[Deleted]

Welcome to the life of a Military Officer, forget the excitement and the heroics, most of the war is fought using a pen and an ancient PC still running windows 95.

[Deleted]

Welcome to the life of a Military Officer, forget the excitement and the heroics, most of the war is fought using a pen and an ancient PC still running windows 95.

Don't upgrade to '98! Its a pain

[Reeve]

Romans made unbelievably complex architectural buildings without computers to do the maths.

If they can construct monumental palaces, colosseums and a harbor the size of a small city, then don't you think its pretty doable for them to figure out how much it would cost to send troops up north? They where masters of strategie, so they probably had a good system to figure out how much bread they needed to keep the soldiers well fed.

And as someone pointed out, there number system is only viable with small numbers, so they probably tried to use the smallest possible numbers.

It would actually be pretty interesting to see their engineers and logistics at work, today we need a calculator to figure out what the price of our groceries is, I think we could learn a thing or 2 from the ancients, maybe they used maths in a way that we can't because of our arabic numbers?

I never suggested it couldn't be done. Clearly they did it. I'm just curious how, and amazed that they did, especially as someone whose job it is to estimate this sort of thing. It's incredibly easy to make one mistake and have the difference be millions of dollars. That effect would just be amplified in the ancient world.

[Deleted]

Romans made unbelievably complex architectural buildings without computers to do the maths.

If they can construct monumental palaces, colosseums and a harbor the size of a small city, then don't you think its pretty doable for them to figure out how much it would cost to send troops up north? They where masters of strategie, so they probably had a good system to figure out how much bread they needed to keep the soldiers well fed?

It's not a case of figuring out how much bread you need to feed your soldiers. It's a case of "The state has assets valued at £X and we need to spend some of those assets on a bunch of things" and keeping track of how much stuff you have can be difficult without double entry bookkeeping.

For example, our bank is currently overdrawn by about £5000 at work, but I know we have, say, £20,000 on our SLCA and our payment terms are universally 14 days. In those 14 days we'll have to pay for A, B, and C items, with a value of £5000 each, so I know that in 14 days we will have cleared our overdraft, assuming everyone pays on time and we pay cash etc etc etc. Or maybe when I buy A, B and C i maybe wont have to pay immediately, so they'll go on our PLCA and we'll owe it, but also we'll be owed by our customers and we'll be able to work out very easilly how much we have available to us, and how much we can spend on other stuff while still having enough to pay for things we have bought on credit.

If you didn't have double entry bookkeeping like in roman times, you may know that you have £5000 and you need to spend £2500 on bread, so you're like "okay I'll buy the bread" but then in a few days someone you owe money to comes and is like "Where is the £3000 you owe me" and you're like "sorry dude i don't have it because i spent £2500 on bread". Or equally, maybe you bought the bread and it was all okay but you forgot to make a note of that, so you still think you have £5000 and then you're like "Oh man, we're loaded and we can buy these new swords for £4000" and you buy them on credit, and then when it comes to payday you don't have the money because you forgot to note down the bread money, and the swordsmith who sold them to you gets pissed off because you can't pay him and never makes swords for you again. Double entry bookkeeping tends to eliminate this because you get to the end of a month or whatever and you're like "Weird, we've got an entry into our stock of £2500 bread, but entry on the bank or PLCA to show where it's come from and now it doesn't balance. WE must have forgotern to make a note of that transaction, let's do it now and oh look, we have less money than we thought we had, best not buy those swords"

[Elegiac]

It would actually be pretty interesting to see their engineers and logistics at work, today we need a calculator to figure out what the price of our groceries is, I think we could learn a thing or 2 from the ancients, maybe they used maths in a way that we can't because of our arabic numbers?

We know how they did it from a mathematical standpoint because much of what they used still forms the basis for modern geometry. The difficulty comes from the fact that several mathematical concepts that are fairly integral to our understanding were lacking in the Classical period - most notably the all too crucial concept of zero.

[Puupi]

I never suggested it couldn't be done. Clearly they did it. I'm just curious how, and amazed that they did, especially as someone whose job it is to estimate this sort of thing. It's incredibly easy to make one mistake and have the difference be millions of dollars. That effect would just be amplified in the ancient world.

Now you know how us Europeans think of Americans (and British) and their imperial system.

[Elegiac]

Now you know how us Europeans think of Americans (and British) and their imperial system.

Imperial is perfectly functional. It's just not very rational, nor does it derive its base units from scientific phenomena in the manner of SI.

[Puupi]

*snip*

You know during Roman times they actually could "print" money. Someone fucks up calculations-> "print" more money!

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Imperial is perfectly functional. It's just not very rational, nor does it derive its base units from scientific phenomena in the manner of SI.

Roman numbers are perfectly functional, too.