Accountant in 1980: Spreadsheets, scandals and the Big Four

The keeper of the books: heir to a craft so old it invented writing itself, now negotiating with the software built to automate it. Accounting is older than literature — in fact it produced writing. The earliest tablets from Uruk, in modern Iraq, are not poems or prayers but receipts: barley delivered, sheep owed, rations paid. For five thousand years since, every state, temple, guild and company has needed someone to keep the record of who owes what to whom, and the keeper of that record went by many names — scribe, steward, clerk — before settling on accountant.

The modern profession is younger and more precisely dated: it begins in 1854, when Scotland's accountants received a royal charter and invented the "chartered accountant," and in 1896, when New York created the first "certified public accountant." Between those dates and now, securities law made the audit compulsory, the spreadsheet swallowed the paper ledger, and a trade of quill-wielding counting-house clerks became a global profession of more than three million credentialed members.

This page follows the craft from clay tokens to cloud software: how double entry spread from medieval Italy to the whole world, what accountants actually do all day and in busy season, who reached the top of the profession — a friar, a potter, a whistleblower — how much the work pays on four continents, and how much of it artificial intelligence can honestly be expected to take.