Accounting: Is It Really That Bad?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Pretty much universally, any reference to the profession of accounting in literature, TV or film uses it as a metaphor for stultifying dullness and numbness of the soul. Usually in conjunction with some kind of anal-retentive, super-organized neat-freak personality on display, or one of extreme meekness and knuckling under petty authority (or both).

Just in the past long weekend alone, I’ve come across:
[ul][li]A character in the Terry Pratchett book Night Watch who is liberated from his role as an accountant and becomes a watchman[/li][li]A Monty Python sketch where an accountant goes to career counseling, and is crestfallen when told all tests indicat that he is ideal for a career in accounting[/li][li]The scene in the movie version of the musical version of The Producers where the office Leo Bloom works in (the accountant) is a room full of soul-killing boredom[/li][li]The “pilot” episode of the cartoon version of The Tick, where Arthur leaves his job as an accountant to become a superhero’s sidekick after his individualism in wearing his “bunny suit” (“it’s a moth suit!”) to work is complained about by “the other accountants” (a nameless bunch of conformists)[/li][/ul]
Are there any depictions of accountancy that anybody can think of that is not making use of this common perception?

And for all the real accountants reading this thread… How do you feel about all of this?

2

Well, at least they know about their reputation. The CAs in Quebec are doing a pretty big effort to try and depict the profession as really cool, with among other things huge ads in the Montreal subway. (Warning: Flash intro)

3

Related and relevant question: What do accountants do exactly?

-FrL-

4

Account.

5

What do we do? In my case, try to find an acceptable job where I don’t work with other accountants that doesn’t eat more than 40 hours of my week, and use the procedes to pay for a real life on the side. Oh, and it’s something to do with numbers. I refuse to get involved with public accounting, which is where most of the soul-eating happens.

We don’t get any positive ink. We’re vultures, really, going in and picking at the corpse of the last quarter and regurgitating financial statments that can say pretty much whatever the CFO tells us they should, regardless of reality.

Just for fun, I wrote a sleazy fanfic Star Wars porn featuring hot rogue Imperial Accountants. As far as I know, that’s the only positive portrayal of accountants I’ve ever read, and even then they worked for the Evil Empire.

6

Another example: in the Dilbert comic, the Accounting department is a subterranean world inhabited by subhuman trolls.

I can think of a number of accountants I’ve met who seem to have quite a bit of a good time at their thing, including an encyclopedically cultured decorated war veteran, and a CPA who walked away from E&Y to set up his own practice and never looked back and is prone to just putting $30K into his wife’s account and say “buy yourself something nice”. Who enjoy travel and fine food and wine.

I dunno, I would have guessed that after that ENRON thing the accountants would have gained at least *some * small degree of bad-boy cred… but I guess that the thing is that even then they were perceived as not having been the ones with the initial flash of criminal creativeness, but rather being enablers. No respect, man…

7

Lots of things.

Accounting is broken down into two big fields - Financial Accounting and Managerial Accounting. Financial Accounting is all the crap that gets reported to the SEC or shows up in the annual report - external reporting. You can do it in house or for a public firm. Audit is usually (not always) a subset of financial accounting. Tax preperation counts here. Also, this kind of accountant generally oversees bookkeepers and bookkeeping processes (like accounts payable).

Managerial Accounting is answering questions like “how should we price our product?” or “how successful are we in this market” or “should we buy this peice of equipment?” Capacity analysis, new product creation, ROI. Things like that.

Then there is the non-financial audit - like auditing against ISO. You don’t need to be an accountant to do audit, but lots of accountants end up being auditors.

Also worth consideration is Financial Systems. Accountants really don’t trust IT types to completely manage systems. Governance could be thrown in here, or could be thrown into Audit.

There are subsets and specialities - like International.

That isn’t it exactly - exactly is a four year degree plus.

8

All I can say is that it is really hard for a kid to understand what Daddy does when he is an accountant.

My brother used to tell people that our Dad was the projectionist at the local movie theatre, and I used to say that he was the manager at the mall. I was closer to the truth; before I was born, that’s what he used to do.

The playing with numbers definition just didn’t sound fun to a kid.

9

I work in IT business systems analysis and consulting but I have been sucked into working on accounting, payroll, and other financial systems before. I would have never guessed that I would have liked it but I did. The key for me was to make it completely abstract and like a series of games and puzzles to be solved. It works well that way for me and I am sure that some accountants feel that way. I am not boring at all personally either. It does make it very hard for you to describe what you do however because outsiders just don’t understand that some of these systems, accounting, and other types of worlds really even exist.

10

It really seems to suit some people’s personalities. When I was a temp, I did accounting for four months. I wanted to put my head through a brick wall. It was definitely not the job for me. However, a rather spritely and intelligent woman who worked with me seemed to love the job. So, to each their own.

11

All I know is that the two guys who owned the biggest, loudest Harleys I’ve ever encountered were a pair of accountants, neither of whom was over 5’ 8" or weighed 170 lbs. They took their fun where they found it.

12

Well, Dad was trained as an accountant (turned HR manager turned Production manager turned Factory manager, later Purchasing manager); so’s Lilbro (currently a Financial manager).

You do need an extreme eye for detail. Being the kind of person who can look at three parallel columns of numbers without actually reading them and say “waitaminutethere’s something wrong in here!”, and who then has the patience to go through the columns until they find the wrongness and fix it helps.

For the daily work of copying figures from a piece of paper to a book (or to the computer, but there’s still people who work on paper) you don’t need much imagination. For being able to figure out which of 27 possible bank loans/credit lines will be best, imagination helps a lot. For negotiating said credit lines with the banks, being able to think sideways, diagonally, and upside down helps. For being able to do what Dangerosa said, massaging real data into a report that the banks will find tassssstyyyyyy and bite on, imagination and creativity are a must.

Bad accountants (of which Libro has suffered several) are unimaginative and dull, but do not have either the eye for detail, the respect for Double Entry and accuracy (I’m not sure if that’s the technical name in English, I’m just an enginerd) or, definitely, the imagination.

And many people simply lack the imagination to understand that working with abstract numbers and turning them into enough money to pay everybody’s salaries while maximizing returns on loans is a blood-pumping challenge for some guys. If I undertand correctly this is more of a “treasurer’s” job, but 99% of it is accounting.

People see Lilbro, evidently a serious guy; they see him dressed more businesslike than most guys his age while not actually suited up (suits are for salesmen, in Spain), and when they hear he’s in Finance they go “oh, ok”. Then the subject of hobbies comes up and for some reason they never expect SciFi, Fantasy and RPGs. I think his Dream Module would be “find the stealing’s vizier’s cooked-up books”, but a good Unga Smash works :smiley:

13

What kind of training does being a full account entail? I think back to my basic accounting class in high school with fondness, and wouldn’t mind looking into it again. I enjoy doing math below the calculus level (which is what I assume most of the work is).

I’m an anal-retentive perfectionist and do logic puzzles in my free time. Should be a match, right?

14

Most of the math is addition, substraction and %. In a company that’s got its head on straight, most of it is also automatic (specially most of Financial). Lilbro’s in his third job, though, and one thing he’s done in all three jobs is reorganize the spreadsheets people were using to reduce duplicate data entry and so forth… lots of companies have ridiculous amounts of duplicate work.

I’m not familiar with requirements in the States, sorry. Your description sounds like a good match to me, yes.

15

I’m currently going to school for accounting - though I’m more likely to end up using it to get into IT governance…

I go to school with a lot of accountants who fell into from bookkeeping - but now they are in school because its a dead end role without a CPA or other certification.

To get a CPA you basically need a four year accounting degree, you need to pass a test, you need work experience as an accountant (you won’t have a big challenge finding a job when you are intending on getting a CPA) Then you need to keep up your CPA through continuing ed. If you are interested in managerial accounting, that’s a CMA.

I’m doing it because I used to be a systems administrator. That didn’t look like a job with long term employment potential to me, so I decided I’d work towards accounting. Combine accounting with 20 years in IT and you have someone you want doing audit and/or governance. Its my future employability plan.

16

I am not an accountant but I do the accounting for the family business. It is indeed mind numbing and soul crushing. :frowning:
It boggles my mind that anyone would willingly choose to go into the profession.
I dream every day of making my great escape. The biggest chain holding me to the job is that the money is pretty damn good.

I am absolutely not cut out for this kind of work. Not one bit.

17

Those who do not learn the lessons of accountancy are condemned to suffer financially. :smack:

Accountants have a dull image - won’t anyone think of the actuaries? :eek:

Are accountants more geeky or nerdish? :confused:

18

Accounting is the language of business. The short answer is that accountants keep track of where a companies money goes. Public companies create three documents each quarter- Income Statement, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow Summary. These statements give a snapshot of the current state of the company. They are generally put together by accountants.
There are different kinds of accountants. Wikipedia gives a pretty good listing:

I’m mostly familiar with Big-4 accounting. The Big-4 are the four largest public accounting firms. They consist of:
Deloitte & Touche
Ernst & Young
KPMG
PricewaterhouseCoopers

There used to be a Big-8 but several mergers and the failure of Arthur Andersen reduced the number to the current 4. For some reason the next firms in line don’t get bumped up (ie number 9 doesn’t become number Big-8). There are also smaller mid-market firms like Grant Thorton and BDO Seidman.

These firms are primarily audit firms but do provide various other accounting and consulting services - IT, real estate, corporate finance, forensic investigations, etc.

As for the accounting “type”, the image of the squirrelly beancounter with the visor and adding machine is pretty much a Hollywood convention (as is the brilliant, good looking young hot shot attorney).

19

In Midnight Run, Charles Grodin was an accountant.

I always liked that role. By tradition “alpha male” measures, De Niro should be the alpha there, but really Grodin is. He has a better life, more money, more integrity. He’s smarter. That movie was the real revenge of the nerds.

I’d advise against that if I were your accountant.

But you’re not my accountant.

I know I’m not your accountant. I’m saying, if I were your accountant -

But you’re NOT my accountant.

Anyway, I sometimes think if I went back, I would have been happy being an accountant, or an actuary. Probably more an actuary, but they both seem like good jobs. Some people just want jobs that occupy their minds all day long. Doing math can be like meditation for some people.

20

And, like I told a colleague who decided to opt out of the company glasses plan: "You’ll pay for your lack of vision!"