The profession or practice of keeping and checking financial records and accounts for individuals or businesses.
From Middle English 'accounten' (to count) combined with the suffix '-ancy' (the practice of). The root comes from Old French 'aconter', ultimately from Latin 'ad' (to) and 'computare' (to count).
Accountancy is why we know how much money governments spend and earn—without accountants verifying numbers, we'd have no idea if someone was stealing billions. It's basically the financial world's fact-checkers, and every scandal from Enron to FTX happened because accountants either missed something or looked the other way.
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