Brown paper bag accounting

I recently had cause to recall a type of work I did whilst studying to become a chartered accountant and in the period just after I qualified - brown paper bag accounts.  This is not some kind of under the table tax evasion scheme but a phrase used to describe the accounts preparation work for the smallest of small businesses. It describes what the client would provide in terms of records from which to draw-up accounts, submit their VAT returns and produce their tax returns.  It would be a bag (ok, sometimes and folder or a box) of expense receipts of various types, from shop tills and handwritten chits to vellum fee notes from solicitors.  There would also be a bunch of bank statements and credit card bills.  If you were lucky there would be a cash book which may record the client's drawings (money taken from the business for personal use) but often not.

This was at first a huge struggle for a new trainee, but with guidance from senior colleagues and partners, and using the knowledge gained from my evening and weekend ACA exam studies, I quickly picked it up.  They became a very satisfying intellectual challenge; how to create order from the seeming chaos of a brown bag of paper.  I became a double entry savant.

These were the days before PCs were ubiquitous, let alone any other devices we use so much today.  The most advanced tech we had was a till-roll calculator.  In fact my calculator was what my mobile phone is today, always with me and (thanks to solar cells) always on. The phrase Ticking and Bashing described the work of accounting trainees at small or medium sized accounting practices:  the ticks on receipts or other lists of numbers and the bashes on the calculator. Of course we would be in awe of the senior partners who could cast (accountant-speake for add-up) a foolscap sheet of figures in seconds without the need of a calculator.