The second oldest profession?
No doubt you have seen pictures of those ancient cave paintings where a bunch of woolly savages are chasing a woolly mammoth off a cliff. You probably noticed that the stick figure at the back was an accountant.
The first written use of the term bean counter was in a 1975 Forbes magazine article which referred to ‘a smart, tight-fisted and austere “bean counter” accountant from rural Kentucky’.
As soon as there were things to count, there were beanies. They went by other names back then, given that the first in their trade were probably preoccupied with divvying up woolly mammoth steaks, or counting bushels of grain going into storage for leaner days. All that tallying and remembering was tricky and prone to later ...
Get The Definitive Guide to Business Finance: What smart managers do with the numbers, Second Edition 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.
