A profession with a bad name
In films, the accountant is the grey character who turns up to say there is no budget. In real history, books of account have been at the heart of fires, trials and scandals that went round the world. These four stories are documented, and each leaves a lesson any business owner can apply on Monday.
The parliament that burned because of counting sticks
For centuries, the English Exchequer recorded payments on hazel sticks. Each stick carried notches of different sizes according to the amount and was split lengthwise: the payer kept one half, called the stock, and the Exchequer kept the other. To check a payment, it was enough to put the two halves together and see whether the notches matched. It was a system almost impossible to forge.
In 1826 the system was abandoned, and two cartloads of old sticks were left at Westminster. In October 1834 someone decided to get rid of them by burning them in the stoves beneath the House of Lords. The stoves overheated and, on the evening of 16 October, the fire spread. That night almost the whole Palace of Westminster burned; the great medieval hall, Westminster Hall, was saved. The palace seen today beside the Thames, with the Big Ben tower, was built afterwards. Years later, Charles Dickens told the story in a speech as an example of bureaucratic folly.
The lesson: old records need managing too. Knowing what to keep, for how long and how to dispose of the rest is part of accounting.
The gangster brought down by his accounts
Al Capone controlled Chicago's bootlegging for years and could never be convicted of his most violent crimes. In 1931 he was convicted of income tax evasion and sentenced to eleven years in prison. The case was built by agents of the US Treasury, who reconstructed his income from seized account books and from what he spent.
The lesson: money leaves a trail, and books tell the truth even when someone would rather they did not. Books in order protect an honest business as much as they expose a dishonest one.
The wrong envelope at the Oscars
Since 1934 the accounting firm Price Waterhouse, now PwC, has counted the votes for the Academy Awards and guarded the envelopes with the winners. At the 2017 ceremony, one of its partners handed Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, by mistake, the duplicate envelope for best actress instead of the one for best picture. Dunaway read out “La La Land”. The winner was Moonlight. The mistake was corrected on stage, in front of millions of viewers, with the other film's team already celebrating.
The lesson: the count was flawless; a control step failed, when the envelope was handed over. In accounting, a good process also needs a good control at the last step.
The law that gives away invented figures
Take every invoice from a year and look only at the first digit of each amount. You would expect 1 to appear as often as 9. It does not: in many real-world data sets, about 30% of numbers start with 1 and fewer than 5% with 9. The astronomer Simon Newcomb noticed it in 1881 and the physicist Frank Benford confirmed it in 1938 with thousands of figures; today it is called Benford's law.
Auditors use it to spot invented figures: people who make numbers up tend to spread the first digits too evenly. It does not prove fraud on its own, but it shows where to look.
What they have in common
A split stick, a seized ledger, an envelope and a list of invoices. In all four stories, what decided the outcome was a record: its reliability, its control or its fate. Accounting is not just adding up; it is keeping a record in a way others can trust.
Where Aconta Online comes in
Aconta Online applies to every entry the controls these stories were missing: it refuses one that does not balance, never edits a posted one, keeps every correction as a reversal with its date and who made it, and lets you download all your data whenever you like. The first company is free, no card required.
Questions
Is it true that a fire in the British Parliament started because of accounting?
Yes. In October 1834 the tally sticks the Exchequer no longer used were burned in the stoves of the House of Lords, and the fire destroyed most of the Palace of Westminster.
Why was Al Capone convicted?
For income tax evasion, in 1931. Treasury agents reconstructed his income from seized account books and from his spending.
What is Benford's law?
It is the observation that, in many real-world data sets, numbers starting with 1 are far more common than numbers starting with 9. Auditors use it to spot figures that may have been invented.