WHEN early humans ran out of toes and fingers for keeping count they began to carve notches on pieces of bones.
Fred and Wilma Flintstone didn’t know it but as they ‘crunched’ the numbers the link between accountancy and technology was born.
In ancient Mesopotamia the need to keep track of goods bought and sold led merchants to develop the first system of writing and the Rosetta Stone, the tablet that allowed Egyptologists to crack the code of hieroglyphics, turned out to contain a record of a tax revolt.
From stones of differing sizes representing different values to the widespread use of the abacus, technologies developed that allow for ever more complex calculations.
And the civilisations able to harness the most accurate data were the ones that prospered – part of the Roman Empire’s power came from its commitment to record keeping.
From double-entry book-keeping (Florence in the 12th Century) to the first calculator (Napier’s Bones, Edinburgh, in the late 16th Century), accountants have been at the forefront of developing systems to keep track of goods and money and make speedy calculations.
That’s why accountancy is also linked to the history of computing, from its infancy in the 17th Century to the present day, and has been in at the birth of every development along the way.
The pocket calculator that ousted the adding machine in the 1970s seemed like a huge breakthrough but now that function is just one of many contained on a mobile phone with enough processing power to put rockets into space.
It’s doing it again – this time pioneering the use of Artificial Intelligence to take over the more mundane tasks associated with the job and freeing up accountants to use creative and intuitive skills to help clients in ways early ‘bean counters’ could never have imagined.
But as technology hardware has shrunk in size and grown in power, the job of accountants has widened in scope.
Now every accountant is also a trusted business adviser to their clients.
It’s your ability to know not only what the numbers say but also which way the winds of change are blowing that makes you way more valuable than any computer.
So, if you’re one of the accountants who uses s1jobs to keep track of current vacancies and plot your next move, you should be proud to belong to a profession with a long history of shaping the world.