The profession stopped teaching bookkeeping as a craft.
Somewhere around 1995, the accounting profession outsourced bookkeeping. Senior practitioners stopped doing the work. Firms treated it as a cost center. Software vendors filled the gap, and an entire generation came up without learning to build a clean set of books from source documents.
The result is a gap hiding in plain sight. Senior accountants who can sign a return but can't produce operational financials. Bookkeepers trained as QuickBooks data-entry clerks instead of practitioners. Clients paying real money every month for books that don't actually tell them anything about their business.
Meanwhile, the profession has spent fifteen years pushing smaller firms toward offshore outsourcing — work performed across twelve time zones by teams who can't exercise the judgment real bookkeeping requires. The pitch promises efficiency. The reality is quality drift, communication overhead, client confidentiality concerns, and the steady erosion of domestic craft knowledge.
The Bookkeeping Method is a different answer. Not cheaper labor offshore. Better methodology, here, practiced by skilled practitioners accelerated by tools that finally put leverage in their hands.