Article1990

Fixed Asset Accounting in the Shipping Industry: P&O 1840–1914

32 citations0/0 files storedAccounting Business & Financial History

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Accounting Theory and Financial Reporting Historical Economic and Social Studies Accounting and Organizational Management

Abstract

The Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&O) was one of the most important British shipping companies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The extensive P&O archives reveal the evolution of the company's methods of accounting for its fleet of merchant ships, from an initial arbitrary depreciation reserve fund, through relatively systematic application of the reducing balance method, to a rigid adherence to straight line depreciation. P&O saw depreciation largely as a source of internally generated funds for asset replacement, and secondarily as a means of dividend smoothing. The latter objective was also achieved through the use of a secret reserve. P&O's accounting methods were rarely innovative, but taken together they epitomize the ‘best’ accounting practices of their day.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 32 citations exist upstream.

References

1990A History of Financial Accounting.2013The Rise of the Corporate Economy 1966The Origin and Evolution of Nineteenth-Century Asset Accounting 1991Accounting for the “railway mania” of 1845— A great railway swindle?1989A history of financial accounting 1985The Origins and Evolution of the Double Account System: An Example of Accounting Innovation 1975Cunard and the North Atlantic 1840–1973 1965Nineteenth Century Accounting Error

Cited by

2015Accounting for capital: the evolution of an idea 1991Secret accounting: the P&O Group in the inter-war years 1995Industrial Accounting Theory and Practice: Cost Accounting in the Belgian Coal Industry During the First Half of the Twentieth Century 1994ACCOUNTING PRACTICE AND BUSINESS FINANCE: SOME CASE STUDIES FROM THE IRON AND COAL INDUSTRY 1865—1914 2005Topics in accounting for impairment of fixed assets

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.