Reviewed by William L. Talbert Georgia State University

Business Methods and the War is a reproduction in book form of four lectures delivered in 1915 at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The author directs that the lectures should be regarded “in the light of a few suggestions as to how business men might, with great advantage to themselves, take to heart such lessons as the war may have to teach them. After all, war is a business, and business—like life—is one long battle.

In the first lecture the author discusses business, military, and labor organization, including an interesting history of organization through ancient, mediaeval, and modern times. He concludes that business has much to learn from the military, and that the Accounts Department of a business should occupy a position similar to that of any other staff department, and that operational personnel “should be brought up to regard them as friends and allies, rather than as natural enemies.” In the other three lectures he treats such topics as business training and technical education (comparing them to military drill), the value of accounting as a means of benefiting by experience, waste products and by-products, and war prices and balance sheets.

The Fundamentals of Manufacturing Costs is a handbook whose object is “to draw attention to, and to emphasize the importance of, a Report issued by the Federal Trade Commission of Washington,

U.S.A., on 1st July 1916,” which is reproduced as an Appendix. The Federal Trade Commission’s report is a pamphlet on “Fundamentals of a Cost System for Manufacturers,” and it serves as a vehicle to allow Dicksee to impart two messages, one about uniform accounting methods and the other about dealing with overhead charges. He disapproves of uniform accounting methods, and he proposes that the overhead charges actually incurred should be apportioned over the work done during the time when they were incurred. Concerning such apportionment, he declares that there is “nothing whatever that is magical about the yearly period,” and that “the month would seem to be the normal basis upon which to deal with Overhead Charges.”
Published Balance Sheets and Window Dressing is a book based largely on a series of articles that appeared in The Accountants’ Journal in 1926. This book starts with discussions of the general nature of a balance sheet and uniformity in balance sheets, and then proceeds in the format of an intermediate accounting textbook with capital and liabilities next to the windows and without discussion of revenue and expense accounts. The author’s perception of the general nature of a balance sheet includes the ideas that the statement was framed with a deliberate lack of full disclosure and that shareholders should not expect to be able to understand the statement without studying the language in which it is written. And the author remains opposed to any significant degree of uniformity.

The author seems to believe that most companies keep their accounts using a natural business year, thereby preparing financial statements when business is comparatively slack. This tends to present the affairs of the companies in a particularly favorable light, and the slackness of business provides time for preparing “window dressing.” The author defines “window dressing” as “a somewhat vague term which may cover anything from a perfectly proper desire to take advantage of a lull in business to set one’s house in order, to a deliberate attempt upon the eve of balancing to pass transactions through the books that will put a better complexion upon affairs, even although [sic] those transactions may have laboriously to be undone early in the ensuing accounting period.”