Accounting- Follow the Money

Any enterprise (business, scientific, or artistic) needs adequate funding to be successful. A little money goes here, a little more there, but when budgets dissipate, bankruptcy arrives. Accountants keep businesses running by keeping all the numbers straight or at least give them the appearance of being straight.

I love the specific skill list of Victoriana, and I highly recommend players take one or two specialty skills based on their character’s vocation. Game masters can look at these skills and see hooks suited to draw characters into their adventures. The Accounting specialty skill moves the story forward in ways of which the other skills can only dream, however to perform their most potent “magic” they have to access to their “grimoirs”: receipts, invoices, business records and ledgers.

The Victorian “man of business” needs the unvarnished truth of a business’s dealings to do his job. If you’re really thorough, asking lists of disjointed questions and looking closely into private matters is all part of a day’s work. Accountants have a reason to be wherever they are found, provided an open ledger is nearby.

Once an accountant gets hold of a ledger they can be as destructive as anyone armed with a list of their target’s assets, profits, and expenses. There can be lists of anyone they do business with, owned property, housing, and wage records. It may be in plain itemized lists or chaotic illegible piles of notes, but somewhere deep is all the information anyone needs.

Irregular expenses suggest irregular operation. If you find records of deliveries to a house in the country, regular payments to a few known thugs, and an unusual amount of entries for “assorted laboratory glassware” coinciding with reported grave robbings, you may have found the necromancer.

Skill Overlap
The abilities and experience of an accountant could bleed into other Specialty Skills in some instances. This won’t outshine the other skill’s usefulness but it can help round out a party’s abilities if they need it. 

Appraisal

A veteran accountant could use their professional experience to see the true face of a business’s financial state without seeing a ledger. A bankrupt enterprise can hide behind a thriving exterior, but letters from loan companies and bottles of second-rate ink tell the whole story.

Business

Obviously, accountants are well traveled in the world of business. News of success and failure, or criminal dealings  pass through an accountant’s perception.

Conceal/Forgery

Whether to dodge creditors, the income tax, police, or investors, the criminally inclined hire unlawful accountants to cook their books. A forger good with numbers can hide debt or success by shifting figures in columns, adding decimals, and making up entire factories of deductible expenses.

More lawfully, an accountant might recognize when handwriting is being imitated or if the wrong kind of ink was used in an official document.

Intimidate

An accountant knows how to hit a man where it hurts: his bank account. The ability to deduce the upper classes income tax could be the only leverage available to a middle class man of numbers.

Legal Matters

While money matters and the law are closely tied in all human civilization, Victorian businesses sometimes hired lawyers to audit their finances. Their audit could then be presented to courts or officials if required. Even if an auditor isn’t a lawyer, they will have some knowledge or taxes, fines, and financial statutes.