An approach to accounting, legal and moral foundations of the charge and discharge system, a method used for accountability

Abstract

The charge and discharge accounting system has traditionally been considered as one of the forms used to make the account and reason to a steward who would be responsible of managing the property of another person. This procedure consisted in charging the steward with the sums for which he was responsible, everything that was received to administer or to manage; the steward would then be discharged of all legitimate payments that he would have demonstrated to have paid at the end of his management. The difference between the charge and the discharge was the scope, for or against the administrator or manager. This procedure determined the position of debit or credit of the person whom the steward was managing the property for.

Conventionally, this procedure has been studied from an accounting point of view, as evidenced by the many written works that have been published to that regard. Most have been analyzing the role of the charge and discharge in different public and private organizations over time. Nevertheless, in the charge and discharge accounting we have observed aspects that go beyond the purely countable one. More specifically, we can guess a way of projecting the account and reason in three dimensions: countable, legal and with a religious or moral connotation, to whose foundations we will refer to in this work.