5
MERE AUTOMATA
Staking out the Big Four’s turf
Accountancy megatrends
In one of his notorious purges, Henry Ford famously sacked his accountants en bloc. ‘They’re not productive,’ he said. ‘They don’t do any real work. I want them out of here today.’ That story cannot be the whole truth; Ford’s enterprise would’ve collapsed without in-house bookkeepers and financial controllers. But the anecdote helps illustrate a wider twentieth-century trend, that of large industrial companies electing to outsource their accounting services. Corporates that had maintained significant in-house accounting units – such as IBM and Unilever – would decide it was preferable to buy those services from the marketplace.
This trend, unsurprisingly, helped spur and transform ...
Get The Big Four now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
