Before electronic banking, how did wealthy businessmen keep track of their earnings?
In: 399
Banks kept a paper ledger and tracked deposits and withdrawals.
Balancing a chequebook was a thing to people did.
Stock certificates were paper and you kept them in a safe. Same with things like government bonds. Same thing with land deeds.
One of the reasons that the bank robber Pretty Boy Floyd was popular with the public was that he burned the mortgages that the bank he was robbing kept on file. Once mortgage document was destroyed, the mortgage ceased to exist, unless other copies could be found.
Other times wealth was kept in physical objects like paintings, the silverware, jewels, or gold coins in a safe Scrooge McDuck style.
Everything was recorded on paper.
At one point, there were entire floors of office buildings were full of desks for accountants that were there simply to track all the financials. Payroll, accounts receivable, accounts payable, and so on. There’s a story of a manager of one of these accounting floors who wept when he saw a computer manipulate a single change throughout a spreadsheet nearly instantaneously because he knew it would have taken his entire floor of people over a week to accomplish the same thing and he also realized that hundreds of his people were about to lose their jobs.
Go back far enough and things were recorded on clay tablets. Basically the king/lord/emperor owned everything and an army of scribes made sure the common folk fulfilled their responsibilities.
In South America, they recorded sums using a complicated system of strings and knots.
For a long while in England, the tax department would break a stick in half and give you one piece while they stored the other. If there was ever a question of you having paid your taxes, you could bring your half of the stick in to verify that you paid if it matches the other half they had ‘on file’. There’s still mountains of sticks in storage in museums over there as ancient financial records.
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