I think accounting deserves more respect. Its value is obvious to someone with any monitary or business experience (almost everyone), which is saying a lot. But at the same time I think it’s moderately silly to think that it enabled the Renaissance to take off. Double entry was a technological innovation, as such, like any major technology at the time it amplified but inherently couldn’t be a major root cause (since what led to double entry had a root cause: capitalism, aka the system of politics that demands a highly accurate accounting of wealth accumulation given its propensity to generate such). Without capitalism, double entry would barely have a reason to exist; without double entry, capitalism would be a lot less effecient – they need eachother, but one naturally predates the other.

Back in the days when everything had to be calculated by hand, I imagine accounting was a very error-prone process. And any repetitive, error-prone calculating process quickly becomes useless without some way to discover and correct the errors.

Before double-entry, any attempt to keep track of profits and assets through multiple transactions quickly became useless because of the accumulated weight of calculation errors. Double-entry was the innovation which made accounting accurate enough to be useful.

It isn’t a stretch to say that double-entry enabled much larger and better-organized enterprises to exist, because it allowed the magnates of the time to understand whether their various schemes were profitable.

It might be a stretch to say that it caused the rennaissance, but the influx of new wealth at the time certainly didn’t hurt.