🧾The Greats

Datini ordered his papers preserved after his death in 1410, and Prato forgot them: in 1870 researchers found roughly 150,000 letters and more than 500 account books stuffed in sacks under a staircase of his palazzo, where they had lain for over four centuries. Iris Origo built her 1957 classic The Merchant of Prato from them. Childless, Datini left his fortune to a charitable foundation for Prato's poor, the Ceppo, which operates to this day.

Railway-mania frauds had burned British investors throughout the 1840s — companies paying dividends out of capital while directors marked their own homework. In 1849 Great Western Railway shareholders brought in Deloitte to examine the books independently of the board, an appointment historians count as the first independent audit of a public company. He went on to devise a standard accounting system for railways, expose fraud at the Great Eastern Steamship Company, and serve as president of the young Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales.

Wedgwood's 1772 analysis separated fixed from variable costs and showed that higher volumes spread fixed overheads thinner — so he cut prices to chase volume in the slump, the opposite of his rivals' reflex. The same hard look at the books uncovered that his head clerk had been concealing embezzlement for years. Historian Neil McKendrick's 1970 study of the episode made Wedgwood a standard opening case in the history of cost accounting.

Translating Bryant and Stratton's Common School Book-keeping, Fukuzawa had to invent Japanese terms for concepts Japan's merchant houses tracked differently, coining karikata and kashikata for debit and credit. The timing was exact: Japan's first modern bank, driven by industrialist Shibusawa Eiichi, opened the same year and adopted Western-style books. In 2024 the two men traded places once more — Shibusawa's portrait replaced Fukuzawa's on the ¥10,000 note after forty years.

Smith applied to the ICAEW in 1888 and was refused on the ground that "member" in its royal charter meant a man; repeated attempts failed the same way. She simply kept practicing under her own name for three more decades. After the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 opened the professions, the institute admitted her as a fellow in May 1920 — a 75-year-old principal of her own thirty-year-old firm, and the first chartered woman anywhere in the world.

Working late in 1930, Wilson pulled a dusty package from a storeroom of evidence seized years earlier in a raid on Capone's Hawthorne Smoke Shop. Inside was a ledger recording a gambling operation's profits. His team matched the handwriting to cashier Leslie Shumway, traced him to Miami, and persuaded him to testify that the profits flowed to Capone — unreported, untaxed income. Capone received eleven years, convicted entirely on bookkeeping.

Told by CFO Scott Sullivan to delay her review, Cooper's team instead worked nights, quietly pulling records from the accounting system to avoid tipping off colleagues, and found routine network "line costs" capitalized as investments to inflate profit. In June 2002 she went past Sullivan to the board's audit committee. Sullivan was fired and later imprisoned; WorldCom filed the then-largest bankruptcy in US history weeks later; Time named Cooper a 2002 Person of the Year.