Josef Klemens Kreibig and Richard Reisch · 1949
Kreibig and Reisch’s Bilanz und Steuer is a postwar textbook of bookkeeping, balance-sheet doctrine, and taxation that treats accounting as both a technical system and a legal-economic discipline. Its exposition proceeds from elementary bookkeeping concepts through double entry, inventory, account plans, valuation, reserves, profit calculation, audit, analysis, special balance sheets, and tax questions. The book’s central premise is that accounting numbers are not self-evident facts: they acquire authority only through orderly recording, documentary proof, legally meaningful classification, and valuation rules suited to the purpose of the balance sheet.
The authors begin by grounding bookkeeping in evidence. Entries are not merely arithmetical marks but claims about economic events that must be demonstrable. This documentary conception gives accounting its juridical force and also limits arbitrary manipulation.
Jede Eintragung in die Handelsbücher muß durch einen Beleg begründet werden.
English translation: Every entry in the commercial books must be substantiated by a supporting document.
Their account of double-entry bookkeeping follows from the same systematic impulse. Double entry is presented not as a mechanical convention of debit and credit but as a dual representation of enterprise life: each transaction is seen once from the side of assets and once from the side of capital. The balance sheet therefore becomes the point at which running records, inventory, and capital calculation are brought together. Bookkeeping is a monetary ordering of heterogeneous goods and transactions, but this very translation into money makes valuation assumptions unavoidable.
Das Wesen der doppelten Buchhaltung besteht demnach in einer doppelzügigen Verrechnung, je nachdem wir einmal die Verrechnung vom Standpunkte des Vermögens, das andere Mal vom Standpunkte des Kapitals betrachten.
English translation: The essence of double-entry bookkeeping consists accordingly in a two-fold recording, according as we regard the recording once from the standpoint of assets and once from the standpoint of capital.
A major conceptual theme is the separation of external financial accounting from internal operating calculation. The authors treat account plans not simply as lists of accounts but as instruments for distinguishing legal reporting, capital maintenance, and managerial cost analysis. In this respect the book reflects the postwar need for disciplined accounting architecture: financial statements must serve creditors, owners, tax authorities, and public law, while internal accounts serve production and operational control.
Der entscheidende Unterschied des EKR nach ÖKW liegt in der Trennung der Finanz- (Geschäfts-) Buchhaltung von der Betriebsbuchhaltung unter deren Ausscheidung aus dem System überhaupt.
English translation: The decisive distinction of the uniform chart of accounts (EKR) according to ÖKW lies in the separation of financial (business) bookkeeping from operational (cost) bookkeeping, with the latter being excluded from the system altogether.
The later sections apply this discipline of distinction to reserves, provisions, accruals, valuation corrections, goodwill, revaluation, and special balance sheets. Kreibig and Reisch repeatedly warn that familiar balance-sheet labels may conceal unlike economic contents. Their doctrine is therefore one of conceptual hygiene: reserves are not all the same, liquidity may be weakened by formal asset ties, and transitory accounts can become especially convenient vehicles for disguising period results.
Es kann ohne Übertreibung gesagt werden, daß mit keinem Konto solcher Mißbrauch getrieben wird wie mit dem transitorischen Konto.
English translation: It can be said without exaggeration that no account is so much abused as the transitory (accrual) account.
The book’s broader significance lies in its restrained theory of balance-sheet truth. It does not deny the necessity of precise bookkeeping technique; on the contrary, it insists on entries, evidence, account structure, and formal closure. Yet it shows that valuation, legal purpose, tax treatment, creditor protection, future earning capacity, and monetary instability all shape what a balance sheet can truthfully say. Bilanz und Steuer is therefore best read as a systematic manual for an economy in which accounting must be exact in method while remaining aware that its “truth” is controlled, relative, and institutionally framed.
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