Keeping and recalculating a ledger by hand

The ceded act is narrow and it is the one that took the hours: rewriting a column of figures after every correction. Posts for bookkeeping and accounting clerks fell in the United States from the early 1980s, while the number of accountants and auditors rose from around 339,000 in 1980 to about 1.4 million in 2022, so the work moved upward rather than disappearing. The spreadsheet also made a new kind of error possible, silent and copied down a whole column. What is not ceded is choosing which numbers belong in the sheet, knowing which ones are made up, and signing the accounts.