'The Household General' is a term coined in 1861 by Isabella Beeton in her influential manual "Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management". Here she explained that the mistress of a household is comparable to the commander of an army or the leader of an enterprise. To run a respectable household and secure the happiness, comfort and well-being of her family she must perform her duties intelligently and thoroughly. For example, she had to organize, delegate and instruct her servants, which was not an easy task as many of them were not reliable. Isabella Beeton's upper-middle-class readers may also have had a large complement of "domestics", a staff requiring supervision by the mistress of the house. Beeton advises her readers to maintain a "housekeeping account book" to track spending. She recommends daily entries and checking the balance monthly. In addition to tracking servants' wages, the mistress of the house was responsible for tracking payments to tradesmen such as butchers and bakers. If a household had the means to hire a housekeeper, whose duties included keeping the household accounts, Beeton goes so far as to advise readers to check the accounts of housekeepers regularly to ensure nothing was amiss.