I’m not talking about CPA’s and tax consultant types, but lower level staff accounts and financial analysts who work for large corporations. Understand, in no way shape or form is my subject line meant to imply disdain, I’m just curious.
I think it has something to do with Faulkner’s “men lead lives of quiet desperation” line, but don’t quote me; I’m busy. Dick says I have more people to wave at.
I think accountants stop business owners from making dumb tax mistakes, of which there are lots. Get a couple of cold ones into a lonely-looking accountant and the stories come tumbling out in a hail of brutal resentment. My favorite is the up-abd-coming one; where businesses “forget” to file for sales tax. Not “forget” to collect it, file for it in the first place. Then they get this mystified “I dunno” look on their faces when the city, county and state want to know where their bleeping money is.
You are at it again George. It was Thoreau.
Thoreau stole something too and got away with it?
I’m a budget analyst. Basically that’s this company’s title for a financial analyst.
Depending on the time of the month/year, here’s the kind of stuff I do:
I do a lot of financial reporting: showing budgeted expenses and revenue versus actual expenses and revenue. Involved in that usually some sort of analysis. Why are we so far over budget? Why are sales so low? That kind of thing.
I’m also heavily involved in budgeting: I “help” (depending on your perspective) put the budget together, trying to factor in all pertinent expenses. Then during the year, a large part of my time is spent tracking to that budget. I get all spending requests, and I must make sure they’re budgeted. If not, I’ve got to work out where the money will come from to pay for it.
I’m also involved in some project accounting: total cost for each development project (I work at a medium sized pharmaceutical development company), total FTE that spend time on each project, fully loaded project costs, etc.
Unfortunately I also do work on fixing errors in expenses. Something gets charged to the wrong department or account, so I’ve got to figure out where it should go.
Of course, if you asked the managers in various groups at my company, they’d say that what I do all day is find ways to create work for them and make them miserable.
Note: accountants and financial analysts are blanket terms that may include lots of different tasks. Depends on WHAT actually you’re analyzing. This is just my small corner of the world, which is for the most part limited to a company’s operating expenses. Just wait 'til the fixed asset, inventory & revenue analysts get in here…!
They account, silly!
::d&r::
And how many of you accountants got into the business primarily for the lion-taming and/or the hat?
I have known some. One guy spent 4 hours on a spreadsheet trying to find out where a missing $34 was…another accountant re-did our bosses store income spreadsheets & found out after doing them they were off by about 12 cents & the boss apologized to us for that.
Of course, sometimes when they get constipated they have to work it out with a pencil… 
I’m an accountant for a large New England based financial corporation. Basically I do daily accounting for a group of good sized mutual funds.
Here’s the daily run down…
Calculate Post & Verify daily variable expenses.
Calculate gain loss margins for Futures contracts, and process futures trades.
Process money market transactions.
Lunch.
Process spot & forward transactions, tie out to the contracted investment manager’s statement.
Process and book equity trades through various portfolios of the funds.
Run a series of tolerance checks on the gain/loss of the equity, futures, money market & forward transactions.
Calculate NAV price of the fund, based on shareholder activity and the total net assets of the fund itself.
Most activity is done with spreadsheets and the online accounting systems. I probably spend about 8 of my 10 hours a day staring at a monitor, and the other 2 running around gathering reports. When I first got into this job I expected to have to do a lot more manual type accounting, but it is so automated & software specific that even a non accounting kinda guy like me can do it well.
You should really check out Herbert Kornfeld’s insightful column over at The Onion. You’d learn a lot about the stone cold crazy bizness of accountin’.
Post on the SDMD!