Twenty-five years ago, I was asked by Matthew Patient (the then senior technical partner of Deloitte Haskins & Sells) to write a publication based on the Companies Act 1985. The firm had published a couple of books on the 1980 and 1981 Companies Acts, but these were legal in nature. I wanted to do something different and extend the book not only to cover the accounting requirements of the law, but also to deal with all the accounting standards (23 accounting standards were in issue). After a lot of hard work, the first manual of accounting was born, with the snappy title The Accounting Provisions of the Companies Act 1985.