Every learned profession possesses an historical background, a traditional heritage, upon which all contemporary practice is based. In accountancy, the summarization of this background is found in the lives of practitioners who have combated business secrecy and unethical procedures, and elevated the profession in the regard of the general public. Members of the profession of public accountancy owe a deep debt of gratitude to their predecessors who have not only sustained it in the regard of the layman but, in addition, advanced its principles and techniques.

After the Revolution merchandise locally manufactured was largely custom-made for the consumer. America's colonial merchants had combined the rôles of importers, exporters, bankers, middlemen, and shopkeepers. Only gradually, in the larger eastern centers, manufacturing other than for direct consumer use developed. It continued as a handicraft, however. The employer disposed of his surplus over local requirements through peddlers who scoured the adjacent countryside on foot or in peddlers' carts. As New England factories and mills developed, shoes, dry goods, tinware, cloth, clocks, firearms, hats, salt, and all the miscellaneous output of its infant industries were peddled throughout the land. Experience as a peddler was the school for the Yankee youth of the day destined for a mercantile career. Out of the towns each spring poured a hoard of young men with flowered carpetbags or with tin trunks strapped to their backs, afoot or with horse and wagon, headed for as distant a point as the Canadian border to the north or as far as Georgia to the south.

In this complex world little can be done without records. Correspondence, memoranda, reports, surveys, inventories, plans, charts, blueprints, fiscal records, legal records, and hundreds of other varieties are all needed so that modern society can function with some degree of control. Business records are accumulating at a staggering rate; for example, one insurance company has acquired over 800,000 cubic feet in a period of about 70 years. The war period with its increased production and added personnel has, of course, accentuated the entire problem.