My bookkeeper died to an errant fire man caused by careless channel digging. At the time, he had achieved "high" precision for my production and trade. When I re-opened the game the next day, my counts had been hidden with the "you need a bookkeeper" text, so I assigned one and set the precision to high. Said bookkeeper did no work, and when I checked his settings, they claimed that enough work had been done to achieve high precision, but the status screen still said I needed a bookkeeper.
I've currently set the precision to maximum, and I assume that once that's achieved my numbers will return, but it's gonna take a while.
Incidentally, recordkeeping gives experience incredibly quickly. My totally-untrained bookkeeper made it to "Competent" just going from 18% of the way to maximum precision to 21% (and gained a level of agility, too).
[ April 11, 2008: Message edited by: Derakon ]
But they do have rock. Lots of rock.
Also, you might be interested in knowing that, while dwarves obviously can keep their imaginary monetary accounts perfectly in their heads, it seems that if you have a bookkeeper the account-keeping also falls to him. Which explains how they can easily have four to five number accounts. I'm talking accounts like 5473 monies.