A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Accurate History of Falling Behind on Your Books

The Sumerians invented writing specifically to track grain and livestock. The very first written records in human history were bookkeeping. Even then, someone was definitely behind on their tablets.

Pharaohs employed scribes to track every bushel of wheat in the kingdom. When the books didn’t balance, the scribe got blamed. Some things never change.

Roman tax collectors were so hated that one of Jesus’s apostles was a reformed one. Even 2,000 years ago, nobody wanted to deal with the money stuff.

Luca Pacioli published the first description of double-entry bookkeeping. Debits on the left, credits on the right. It was elegant, logical, and immediately ignored by most business owners.

Henry Heinz started selling horseradish in clear glass jars — and later, ketchup. This has nothing to do with accounting, but give it a minute.

The 16th Amendment creates the federal income tax. Americans now have to track their income AND pay the government a cut of it. Bookkeeping procrastination immediately doubles.

VisiCalc launched. Then Lotus 1-2-3. Then Excel. Bookkeeping got easier. People still didn’t do it. The backlog just moved from a shoebox to a .xlsx file nobody opens.

Intuit moved bookkeeping to the cloud. Automatic bank feeds. Transaction imports. All the tools you need to stay current on your books.

Narrator: They did not stay current on their books.

Large language models can now categorize, reconcile, and organize thousands of transactions in minutes — work that takes a human bookkeeper weeks. For the first time in 7,000 years, catching up doesn’t have to be painful. It just needs a good name.

We put AI and human bookkeepers together, set a flat rate, and named it after a condiment. Because the only thing more universal than ketchup is saying “I’ll do my books this weekend” and then not doing them.