That’s EXACTLY what my BIL said over x-mas. He is an ex Big 4 partner, and my other sister’s kid is currently majoring in accy. While my BIL and many of his work associates/clients are great guys, he does maintain that there are a lot of accountants who can do the work, but if you have a winning personality it will definitely help you in your career. (Of course, I guess that could be said about most careers!)
BTW - I play a lot of golf and cards w/ my BIL - he says he refuses to play cards with actuaries as they are downright scary good with numbers.
He left the Big 4 firm at 50-ish right after 20-25-ish years when he vested at a certain level re: his pension. He was sick and tired of the pressure to “sell” services, which had increased over that past few years. Now he does consulting which pays him a fraction of his previous (exorbitant) salary, but affords much more flexibility and negligible pressure to sell.
To put it VERY simply, accountants do the accounting and CPAs check it to make sure it’s right
But the actual work is similar and involves large stacks of paper and many hours of spreadsheet work.
The actual folks doing it were young, hip, god-loooking folks who partied a lot, but who at bottom led pretty ordinary, safe lives. (Of course YMMV). Also some accounting departments were stress-filled, in a Dilbertish sort of way, but others were fine.
I left it because I found it boring but some folks loved it.
The best protrayal of any type of accounting was in Shawshank Redemption, where the guy’s escape plan involves him doing taxes for the guards and warden. That’s the only example I could think of–and I wondered about it a lot.
We should also probably make a distinction between accounting and finance.
One way to look at it is that accounting is determining what happened in the past- i.e. you’re compiling data on past events into financial statements and the like, or you’re looking at past data to audit those statements.
Finance, OTOH, is sort of like accounting’s future-facing brother. Finance is more concerned with obtaining sources of funding, etc… It’s still concerned with the same kinds of data, but the difference is the focus.
Accounting is about what did happen, and finance is about what you can make happen in the future.
As for the OP… personally, I find most accounting to be absolutely stultifying. If you have a creative streak, and enjoy the feeling of accomplishment from creating something, or solving something very creatively, then accounting is most definitely not for you. It’s very rule-bound (check out the FASB rules, if you don’t believe me), and tends to be very procedure oriented, sometimes to the point of obsession.
However, if you’re the type of person who is more about the procedure, and doing a good, meticulous job, without necessarily having to have that creative spark in your job, then accounting might be right up your alley.
A lot of accountants who have a creative streak prefer management accounting - which has more to do with “what decision should we make” (not necessarily “how to fund it” - that’s finance) or “how do we measure the value of these decisions.” More leeway, fewer rules, and a lot of business side partnerships in quality or product development teams.
Governance really does tend to be about creating something - but its about creating rules and processes - not something that is going to fill most people’s hearts with the warm fuzzies of accomplishment.
I worked in Tax years ago, and there was a lot of creatively there in terms of structuring deals to be the most tax advantageous and working with the grey areas of the law (“how will the IRS end up interpreting this law? How will case law work out”)
In the classes I’ve taken for my diploma I’ve definitely preferred the management/law/tax classes than the rest of the accounting courses and when we ended up running a simulation during one course I got quite excited at the prospect of applying all the management accounting things I’d learned so recently so I’m considering the management accounting track, if not going to work for the CRA.
Accountants are the Morlocks to modern civilization’s Eloi; (that would be the rest of us to put off doing taxes due to the pain of parsing sense from the Infernal Revenue Services’ agrammatical glurgage). They keep the financial machinery running smoothly and the lights working. Oh, and occasionally they sneak up onto the surface and grab an innocent person, drag them into the steam tunnels below, and butcher them down for stew meat and shoe leather.
It’s best not to think about this too much. Just stay away from the manhole covers.
I’m not officially an accountant, and I don’t play one on TV. No CPA, no accounting degree. But I’ve been on the end of accurately posting transactions so that the financial reporting is accurate. And currently I’m an analyst on the new general ledger we are implementing. So that’s very fun: finding ways to improve people’s jobs and the information that is being booked.
I think it’s like any area where like-minded people are invested in the subject; we can get into exciting discussions about just how things should be booked and represented (within the guidelines of course).
If you prefer management accounting to the mindless tedium of the auditors and their GAAP regulations, you might want to consider management consulting. Management consultants are most commonly pictured as the “Bob’s” from Office Space. To a certain extent that is true. A lot of it involves interviewing people about their jobs and figuring out how the business works. It also involves a lot of accounting, finance and IT. Most of the Big-4 and their consulting spin-offs (BearingPoint, Cap Gemini, IBM Business Consulting and Accenture) have various consulting services for just about everything.
That’s interesting. If you consider the character of Leo Bloom in The Producers to also be a sympathic protagonist, then it seems conventional that the only accountant worth liking is one who is willing to be crooked in your favor.
I’m an IT guy - working on my CPA. Twenty years of system administration, now IT project management and architecture.
And as an IT guy, I wouldn’t trust most of us far as I could throw us - especially us sys admins and ops folk - who are prone to “just get it done.” Its sort of the opposite attitude a CPA has.
Herbert Kornfeld makes accounting sound like good times, what with the fly Cash Room girls and tha Nite Rida and rumbles with Accounts Payable using the Letter Opener of Death
Interesting. In my current environment, it’s the other way around. The finance department is running around in panic mode all the time, begging us to do random database hacks to get various things to work, and we in IT are the ones pulling back on the reins, requiring that things be done right instead of fast, and essentially working to save them from themselves. I have to wonder if, in any customer/support relationship, there are obligatory roles to be played, and we just happen to embody the reverse of the typical arrangement.
FWIW I’m a physicist and was chatting with another physicist, who said she was moonlighting by teaching a course on accounting. I asked her if there was anything to it, not thinking there was. She said no, there wasn’t. A few conventions to remember, and basic ciphering, not even math. She read an instruction book and took a test to become credentialed to teach, and that was all. She said she just wanted something mindless on the side for extra spending money.
The hard part isn’t the conventions or the ciphering… the hard part is keeping a client who wants to consider something immaterial when it should be material. Being able to interpret a bunch of rules that are neither hard nor fast (when should we recognize income?) to the benefit of your employer without risking having to restate your earnings, trying to guess exactly what a SOX audit is going to look like before anyone has done one, or determining which of several different managerial accounting techniques will be most accurate and fair to the parties whose performance you are measuring. Or converting a Japanese balance sheet into US GAAP.
Any yahoo with an average IQ can do the bookkeeping. That’s why computers do that stuff now and bookkeepers are few and far between.
My university - no big shakes as a university - wouldn’t hire her to moonlight without several years of Accounting experience, and MBA and a CPA or CMA. Its the experience that counts.
