The work aims to illustrate the laws concerning the keeping of accounts at the time of the commerce codes. After a synthetic comparative analysis of the main national laws about this issue, the peculiarity of the Italian discipline will be explained. As the commerce codes in the various Countries have been issued and revised in different dates, the analysis will be focused, in particular, on the laws between XIX and XX centuries, period in which the commercial discipline earned a remarkable maturity degree. As we will see, in the Italian experience the legislative dispositions have remained nearly unchanged up to the present day.