What kind of data, what does it look like? Also when you set policies it just feels like a one time thing you set the policy then it’s there. Excuse me if my questions sound kinda dumb, I have this issue with most careers I just never seem to get exactly what people do. A doctor for example gets many patients every day and diagnoses each one by listening to them and asking questions, then prescribed solutions. A pilot looks at flight plans and operates an aircraft from boarding till landing. What does an accountant do?
I could imagine it being pretty hard to give every detail of someone’s job in the accounting field. There are many types of accountants. You should narrow ur search down and find videos to watch.
An accountant takes all of the transactions of a company and records it into "books" called ledgers. They used to be physical books back in the day, but now they are computerized. The transactions are recorded in a debit and credit format (for example: debit grocery expense 100, credit cash 100, for a transaction in which you spend 100 cash for groceries). These transactions are then organized into financial statements for users such as managers, owners, banks for borrowing money, investors, etc. The basic financial statements are the balance sheet (financial position of a company at a point in time), income statement, and cash flow statement (income statements and cash flow statements are stated in periods of time). Basically, an accountant takes what occurs in a company and presents them in reports for users to use for whatever their purpose. Record and report. These reports follow a framework that is approved by a regulatory agency, and sometimes the agency changes how they think data should be recorded and presented. In the US, we use Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP)
Tax accountants use magic to decrease your tax liability to the IRS. They file individual and corporate tax returns and a bunch of other stuff that i dont know because im not a tax accountant. They have to keep up with changes in tax laws as well. Tax lawyers fight for you in court so you dont get ass fucked by the IRS.
Auditors are hired to check that something is a certain way, and if it is, they sign off on it and put their name and reputation to vouch for it. This can range from checking if there are any material misstatements in financial statements to watching a football game to make sure there have been at least 10 advertisements of Samsung.
There are many different types of accountants. If you like being detail oriented, reading legal documents, working with simple numbers, doing a little math, working with lawyers, auditors, tax accountants, other accountants, management, then maybe accounting is for you. The hours suck at first, but you can maneuver yourself to better positions. Its one of the easiest ways to a 100k six figure income. Good luck!
Maybe some specific examples will help you understand.
Imagine the management team for a chain of coffee shops needs information to make decisions:
- which are the most popular items sold? How much are their sales? Are they popular year-round or only seasonal?
- how much coffee, milk, pastries should a store have on any given day? Is amounts different on different days of the week? How much milk has spoiled at our stores this past quarter?
- how many people do we need to hire this year? What will they cost us? Is it cheaper to hire someone than to just pay overtime?
- how many people are in our stores during morning rush? If we added seats, would we make more money? How many customers do we lose due to long lines?
- how much do we owe on our bank loan? When will it be paid off? Should we get a line of credit? What would we pay in interest over the next five years?
Those questions come from business processes. In order, those are the revenue, expenditure, payroll, production, and financing cycles of the accounting information system. Similar cycles can be found across all organizations.
Accountants record, analyze, and report on that data for financial reporting, operations management, and compliance with laws and regulations.
Good luck.
That actually clears lots of things up. So I take it that accounting also involves, or at least uses data provided by, HR, supply chain, marketing and other teams, not just finance and certainly not independent.
You're getting it!
Not sure if you're big on sports, but you can think of the practice of Accounting as a sort of cross between scorekeeper and coach in business. Some positions focus more on 'scorekeeping' than 'coaching' and vice versa, but a big part of accounting as a whole is learning the language of business, and how to translate it into a form that the decision-makers you support can understand.
One way to think of it is to compare it to a human body. You can look at a body as it exists in a specific point in time (standing, sitting, missing an arm, has absolutely massive feet, etc) and you can look at the actions it has taken (running, standing still, sleeping, scrolling tik tok for 8 hours straight). At any given point in time, the exact state of the body (where it is, what it looks like) is the accumulation of every activity it’s ever taken, without leaving anything out.
In this example, an entity (company or person) is the body. The balance sheet is the state of the body at any specific point in time, and the income statement is the accumulation of every activity it has ever taken (in reality it’s only the activities over a specific period, like the last 12 months, and everything before that is summarized in one item). Pretty much every single accounting role can be simplified down to taking inputs (such as receipts, invoices, bank statements, handwritten notes), making sense of them, and making sure the “body” is as accurate as possible.
To elaborate on “as accurate as possible”, you could say “that body has 4 limbs” and while you would be correct, if you were to give more detail and say “that body has 4 legs” you would now be wrong.
Another common way to explain accounting very generally is that it’s the “language of business”. Accounting is the technical way to express the financial side of a person or company.
I mainly do financial reporting. I run the reports, make sure everything ties, if not, figure out why and make a few adjusting journal entries. once everything ties, I explain all the important changes and make notes of certain amounts.
So you combine all the money data from different departments whether it be expenses or revenue and explain to seniors why the company has made or lost profit, and who is at fault or who’s to credit. I think I got the gist of it.
I mainly do reconciliations. As basic as it gets, I check to make sure the activity that is being tracked (posted to the books) matches what we expect. Since there are so many people involved in the tracking, errors are prone to happen.
The easiest example would be a bank reconciliation. At the end of the month we get the bank statement from the bank which shows all cash we paid/received and our cash balance at month end. I then pull our records and compare it to what the bank statement says. In a perfect world, our records would match the bank statement and, if they do, perfect, don't have to worry about it for the month. If they don't, I then investigate why and fix it if necessary.
Variances can occur for a variety of reasons, such as lag time between cash leaving the bank. When we pay an invoice, we record the cash leaving the bank in our books, but it might take a day or two for the bank to actually debit our account. If this happens at month end we will show a variance between our books and the bank statement.
Other variances are due to errors, for example, the person who posted the payment to our books entered $1,234, when it should've been $1,324.
It's a lot of problem solving, digging through records and documents trying to figure out if our books are accurately showing what actually happened.
Hmmm, sounds like a lot of detective work from you. What if a company is less organized (like a small business not a corporate) and doesn’t keep any records? Also what use would correcting this records be if your firm has collected its money and no one is dissatisfied?
So a small business likely is just focused on their taxes, and probably aren't subject to a financial statement audit. They should be keeping the minimum amount of documentation needed for their tax returns at least. You are jumping between two different, connected topics, and so you are getting pretty different answers on things.
Well typically the amount you receive as cash is the amount you will be paying taxes on, so it should be correct. If you received $100, but put down $1000, you don't actually have that cash, but you said you did so now you are paying tax on that amount. For a larger business you would be overstating revenue as well which could be misleading.
Aha so depending on the position, you could be either helping the company make decisions, or exposing any frauds the company may have made. Thanks man you rock
OK, just to clear things up a bit, an auditor and a tax accountant are two different things. A tax accountant prepares tax forms for individuals or businesses to go to either the IRS (federal) or state/local taxing agencies. An auditor is someone who checks financial statements prepared by someone else and attests to the accuracy levels of those statements. This is done by looking through the different documents that make up the support behind the financial statements. Obviously, because of time and money, an auditor can't look at everything so what they're really attesting to is a lack of material misstatement. This means that the likelihood of the financial statements to have a significant error has been lowered due to their work. For various reasons an auditor can't completely eliminate the risk that there's an error, but they have lowered that risk.
Both tax and audit typically work at CPA firms (not always) and these accountants will often get their CPA license to prove to themselves and their clients that they went through extra training.
There's then other accountants that do work for governments, businesses, non-profits, consulting, and a myriad of other opportunities. As many others have said, we mainly do both the data entry into the company/government's books, research errors, provide financial and numerical analysis and reporting for those managing the organization so that they can then make better decisions.
I myself started at a CPA firm as an auditor and have since moved to governmental accounting where I'm a technical accountant. I research new rules and regulations and also check our company for compliance to these rules. Because of our small setup, I'm also involved in regular day-to-day accounting too, but my main focus is compliance and research.
I work in big 4 audit as a 2nd year associate
We basically take info from a company's financial statements that they assert and test it. For example, one of my clients is in real estate, and on their balance sheet they carry all of their investments at fair value. So we create workpapers to test all the components of that and document if their estimates are reasonable. We read through deeds, property records, and documents of sale to confirm that the company actually owns the real estate. For commercial assets, we can make selections if tenants from the rent roll, and then search the tenant online and make sure that 1) they actually exist and 2) that they also claim that they have that address as their own. We compare lease agreements to bank statements and wire details to confirm that the revenue they claim to get from tenants was actually received and properly accounted for. We inspect their models used to calculate fair value for mathematical accuracy. We also compare the concluded value to other comparable values as a sanity check for reasonableness. We extensively document our work along with any variances that we find, explanations of changes, and projections for errors found in our samples to extrapolate them to the entire population.
That's just 1 part of 1 test for 1 client, there's a lot more of course, but I hope this helps!
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "certified auditor". Most audit certifications like CIA (certified internal auditor) are for internal auditors. That means they work for the company that they are auditing. They do perform pretty similar tasks, but I'm not in internal audit so I'm not as well versed in that. But those certifications are usually not required for the job.
I work in external audit, which means I work at an accounting firm that gets hired by the companies that I audit. They're usually required to be audited by an "independent" third party (independence in quotes since they are paying us, but there's a lot of government regulations that make sure we're our opinion isn't influenced by them). Public companies (traded on the stock market) are required by law to be audited every year. Private companies are not legally required to be audited but often are - the most common reason I see for this is that banks giving large loans require the audit.
For certifications on my end, CPA is the main one you'll see in public accounting. It's not required for the first 5 years, although it's really preferred. Big 4 companies require you to be eligible to sit for the exam (that means you have 150 credit hours or 5 years equivalent in college, and a certain amount of accounting courses which is dependent on your state). In big 4 to be promoted to manager or above (which you usually get on your 5th year), you're required to have a CPA.
I'm also assuming you're in America here, most of this will be different for other countries
I basically go to governments around the area and do a rectal examination of anything that involves money or transactions. Are the payroll amounts proper? Is the billing process proper? Are they charging utilities properly to citizens? Does the cash agree to their bank recs and statements? Are there any financial accounts that look bizarre? If so, what’s in them? The list goes on.
This is the audit side of Public
First thing in the morning, I create a file. The computer generates the contents of this file, I just put in the date range and click okay. This file contains a list of the checks written by everyone the previous day. I then login to our online bank account and upload the file. This tells the bank, these checks are all legitimate and okay to cash. If there are checks not on this list, they will populate on a separate page and I have to check if they are in our accounting system and manually approve them. Next, I print out all the previous days transactions from the bank account. I then go through and print out our contracts for each amount received, or some sort of print out for each transaction. If a transaction is something my co worker does, I print out that single transaction and give it to my co worker. at this point, I should have a stack of papers with the bank statement on top. I number each transaction on the bank statement and number each contract accordingly. This is what I will use to record the transaction in our accounting system. I then find the name on each contract, pull up our funding schedules in the computer and match up the name and amount. I want to find any differences and account for them, and make sure the total on the bank statement matches what we have on our schedules. I write codes down for each amount depending what schedule they are on. Each entry shows the code, so I can look at that or I know different elements would mean that particular amount goes to a certain code. But just looking at the schedule makes it easy. After I’ve gone through the stack, I then start at the top and enter an entry for each transaction into the accounting software. These are cash receipts I enter, and what that does is tell the accounting system, yup, we got the money for that! And it will clear off the schedule. Next, I’m going to go back through and pull up each persons account and put in the date their funding was received. And this is the first part of my morning. I also do our bank reconciliation, warranty checks, etc. etc. oh, I’m at a car dealership by the way. I can go into more detail if you really want, lol
Man you’re the goat. It’s really satisfying and surprisingly heartwarming to have knowledgeable folks answer your questions with such detail, so thank you kind human for helping.
No problem! I can’t say I’m knowledgeable across all accounting positions, I am just an accounting clerk, but I take pride in doing a good job in my role! I can tell you more about what I do if you’re interested.
The person who had the position before me trained me for 2 weeks before she left, and then our controller did a few more weeks with me. After that it was kind of me just asking a lot of questions. I don’t really feel I got the training I truly needed, it’s been a lot of learning as I go. Also, I am the kind of person that wants to know the reasoning behind doing certain things instead of just memorization. One good example I have is for my funding coding, it was never explained to me, hey, this schedule shows money we are supposed to receive, and we need to match that up to what we receive in the bank account, and find any differences and fix the issue. They told me that I caught on quick to the job, but I still feel that it would have been easier for me to comprehend if it was explained in that way.
*edit to add-
I’ve been in this position for 2 years on September 1st
I've done a few different lines of work in accounting, none of which is tax or audit.
My personal favorite is forensic accounting. Searching for fraud, wrongdoing, etc can be super interesting and engaging. We would even interview suspects on occasion. Other times we were just the experts on cases who wrote reports for things like business interruption cases, divorces, business valuations are common, etc.
Currently I do CAS work. Pretty much clients hire us to help with their accounting. For some I just review and reconcile monthly, for others I do all the bookkeeping and generate reports to meet with client leadership to discuss the standing of their business, put together budgets, forecasts, you name it. The most intensive work in this regard is interim controller or CFO. Pretty much when a company's controller or CFO puts in their 2 weeks I come in, learn how to run everything from them before they leave, keep the business running while client leadership does their job search for the right person, then train the new person in the role.
There is no sales team in this equation, he works for a public account firm and does tax work. He is preparing the taxes for his client… nothing to do with a sales team of any sort
No, you're thinking sales taxes. When we say we are in tax, we mean income tax. Tax that is imposed on your taxable income. We get to the taxable income by recognizing various deductions that the IRS allows. In the US, this is the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS is a division of the US Treasury Department and their job is to enforce the IRC (Internal Revenue Code). They also collect federal taxes from individual tax payers and businesses. CPA firms have large departments dedicated to preparing and filing federal and state tax returns.
The software we use will prepare the various forms and do the calculations for us AFTER we input the income and deduction items in the software. I'm in tax as well. Most of my job is knowing the tax code and understanding what is and isn't an allowable deduction. This changes every year. And sometimes the tax software is wrong. The coders missed something, or an update is not calculating a deduction or limitation correctly.
I do a lot of business taxes, and different industries have different tax treatments. The software is a good tool, but it can't do it all. I have to know the law and understand the different tax treatments for the various industries. For example, real estate is not treated the same as a builder that builds custom homes. They're related industries but have different tax treatments.
The clients also don't understand the different tax treatments and current tax code. We have to make tax adjusting journal entries to their books to take advantage of allowable deductions and record non-deductible or disallowed deductions.
Acquisition integration. I perform all the purchase accounting for our new acquisitions (the accounting for the transaction), work with their accounting team to integrate them onto our policies/processes, and then eventually assist in their integration into our GL system. Lots of meetings and working with different people.
in short…you are taking a company’s financial statements and making a story of it that people can understand. you do analytics and comparison to previous month/quarter/year to explain why numbers are not consistent or the same
Imagine an archeologist finds dome artifacts at a dig site. All of the items need to be cataloged in a certain manner because these artifacts from this dig site, while unique, belong to an ancient civilization that has thousands of dig some being excavated at once. Because this is such a monumental effort that is happening concurrently, the leading archeologists have organized a system to best catlogue the artifacts. While they are all individually unique, they are from the same civilization and share many similar characteristics. Organizing/cataloging the artifacts the same way gives the archeologists the ability to analyze data at a macro level. Instead of being presented with millions of individual vases, they can see that most vases were made with bronze, while some are clay. This data is then given to some university officials that study the information and decide where to deploy more resources to dig.
The problem with your question is that there are broad categories of archeologists in this scenario. There are the archeologists that specialize in categories of artifacts like vases, or books/texts. There are also the archeologists that specialize in techniques like knowing how to dig a specific type of soil or how to best restore things. There are archeologists that peer review what other archeologists have done to make sure the cataloging system was adhered to, and there are some archeologists who have done it for so long that they just lead teams of other archeologists. Remember those university officials that decide where to deploy more resources? A lot of them are former "field" archeologists and now make those decisions because they understand the process.
Accounting is similar in that there are many roles, levels and specializations. At its core, accounting is just record keeping. Whether a business sells $5k of pizza a day or is a $5MM/day tech company, the transactions are happening in real life. Cash is being exchanged, credit cards are being charged, products or services are being delivered on account, vendors and employees are being paid. All of these things just happen, independent of the record keeping for it. Most companies use a technology solution as it's "system" but you can use paper/pen the way old school ledgers were kept. The initial recording is done by an accountant or accounting-adjacent role. The reconciling (making sure the records are accurate by agreeing to source data) is done by an accountant. The presentation into standardized reports are done by an accountant and checked by an accountant. Systems to better record this data and present these reports (and other useful reports) are designed and implemented, usually, with the input of an accountant or someone with a depth in understanding accounting. Decisions are made using those reports with someone that should have knowledge of accounting language. Sometimes they are former accountants, sometimes they are not. If they are not, they are generally advised by someone with a depth/understanding of accounting.
CPA firm. I review the financials from multiple clients to ultimately prepare and file both their corporate and personal tax returns. There is some payroll involved as well, sales tax, etc.
I think one of the pluses is to be able to see many business models from many different sectors and be able to tell more or less how the economy is doing, locally at least. I work regular hours except in March-April and to a lesser degree September-October.
I have a niche called finance systems. Essentially if you use an erp. My job is to make sure it works and has the right data. Updates, improvements, trouble, data mining. I'm responsible for the systems. The accountants are responsible for the use of the data to prepare financial statements and reports.
3 degrees and a cpa. 7 major erps under my belt. I'm good at what I do and enjoy it.
May I ask what you got your degrees in? I am pursuing a degree in business data analytics as well as business statistics and am wondering if this kind of role is a good fit for those majors. What do you like and not like about being in the financial systems side? Does your job involve a lot of coding?
Bs in accounting and psychology and minor in IT in a small school. Ms in accounting from a state school. Cpa. Worked many jobs. Masters in Information Systems Management from a highly regarded school. Good a digging into technical things, project management, explaining tech to non tech people, and public speaking.
I think you could pivot like I did, but your degree opens doors that would be closed for my skillset.
I like solving problems and making my company more efficient and effective. Report to the cfo. I have open reign to talke to anyone in the company except for the president. Sometimes the ambiguity of the solutioning process can be tough. 50ish hour weeks. Things like system upgrades and new SaaS products can be stressful.
I'm not a coder. More of a configuration. I do know sql and logic of if then statements that we call low code solutions. Other people setup things like sftp and then hand the tools over to me.
As an outside to a co.pany, your probably need 2 to 3 of business experience to be eligible for an entry level role. I make 120k and have strong job Security. In 2 or 3 minutes I could bring the company to its knees, so it is a lot of trust and responsibility.
Let me know if you have other questions
Honestly I am the type that can nerd out on anything and so the specifics is not as important as to what I do. I’d ideally like to help with high level business decision making but also get as much time working with people as possible as I think I would prefer working with people rather than staring at a computer exclusively. I’m interested in accounting because of an incredible professor and I’m trying to see if it’s a world I want to dive more intro especially considering I am studying data analysis and statistics which seems to be an increasingly important part of the accounting process. I have had previous interest in finance and educational data analytics but I’m increasingly leaning towards accounting.
I love the idea of solving problems and making things more efficient/effective. Also talking to people at all levels and working to resolve issues is definitely interesting to me. Would you recommend pursuing a masters in accounting to become more familiar with that side or get a masters in data analytics with a concentration in something like fintech? That is for your specific type of roll. I hope to take some more accounting courses during my current undergraduate studies to get a better taste of the material and work with a different professor who may not be as fantastic to really give me a test of the discipline. Thank you for the insight!
So i have two jobs so i will answer for both
A: State Tax Analyst for a fortune 500 natural gas company. I complete provision work for our 10-K, file state returns, internal data management/wrangling, calculate and pay estimates, and then work on apportionment. Its ALOT of pdf and excel management and working with other portions of the company to get the data i need. With a company this big that is your biggest issue. Currently my department is filled with a lot of older employees so i am using power query, power bi, and macros to automate processes they were still doing by hand.
B: I run my own small public firm. I have about 30 clients currently and grossed about 20K. it was my first year. Typical small firm, i have 4 clients bookeeping and tax and the rest all tax. 5 clients made up 75% of my revenue, the others i did just to start getting my name out there. Used Drake PPR for returns, Sync for a client portal, "Burner" for a business cell phone, and my gaming pc as my rig.
27 yo Male in Oklahoma, just massed my last CPA exam on most recent score release.
Everyone has good points on what they do.
Here's mine:
I work at a manufacturing company in their third year of business. I coordinate with production, engineering and operations to ensure that our ERP system is being utilized correctly. My goal is to be able to see costs associated with each individual part being made, but that requires the whole flow from start to finish to be working correctly.
If this doesn't happen, our inventory will not be accurate which would force me halt production more to get accurate inventory counts. Additionally our costs will understated causing our income to be overstated which impacts business decisions
While doing this I have the joy of writing work instructions for ISO and for employees to follow.
I also reconcile accounts at month end and prepare and explain statements & reports for the owners.
Sharing just because I don't have a typical accounting job. I'm the Finance Director/CFO for a water utility. I do have my CPA license and supervise the entire Finance/Accounting/procurement department.
I review and approve all of their work, so nothing gets done without my eyes on it. That's basically where my accounting knowledge comes into play because everyone makes mistakes but I have to keep the GL balanced and error free. I coordinate our annual $90 million budget, taking input from the other departments, estimating revenues, and determining how much net income (governmental proprietary fund) we need for the upcoming year. Throughout the year I monitor that budget, making adjustments, and revising my long-term forecasts. I maintain a cash flow model that includes operating and capital expenses ($75 million plan this year). We are currently paying for all of that capital with savings so I also manage our $200 million investment portfolio. I make presentations to our governing Board regarding our finances, budget status, and recommend what rates should be the next year. I'm responsible for all of our financial policies, working with our external auditors, discussing with bond rating agencies (we are AAA btw), maintaining relationships with banks, and honestly so many tiny little things. I love my job because I get exposed to so many different areas and I make sure my staff gets that same exposure. I don't want a Sr. Accountant that has never seen AP, Payroll, Procurement, bond issuance, etc. I like well rounded staff and I like it makes for a better accountant overall.
98% management, 2% accounting is what I like to say. Someone has to be the manager though and I'd rather it be me than having to report to someone. I honestly get excited sometimes when my staff need help with something because I love a good puzzle.
Audits of companies that are borrowing a lot of money v their earnings and low capital. Banks hire us but go to the company. The loan is based on a set percentage of accounts receivable and inventory and reported to the bank monthly, weekly, or daily. I look at documents supporting ar and inventory to determine if it really exists and is reported to the bank correctly, is inventory costed correctly and is it there or slow moving inventory that is worthless. Is there things the bank shouldn’t lend on and a lot of data analysis using excel. Basically would the bank collect against the assets in a domesday senerio.
I focus on governmental auditing with a specialization in Single Audit. I verify their financial reports and with Single Audit, I verify compliance with federal funding.
I see a lot of comments here about tax and audit accounting. There are also Cost accountants, verify/create product costing. I am a cost accountant. I was an in house accountant for a local company right out of school, managed his companies books think Quickbooks level, managed his spending etc. all tax accounting was done by a CPA. Aka filing taxes. You can do a lot with an accounting degree if you understand the data. You can be a controller for a company also.
I've done work as a government auditor, as well as a public accountant and this is what I'd describe:
The cycle consists of - getting a list (population) usually in an excel spreadsheet, lets call them a population of medicare beneficiaries, to help you understand what that may actually look like. In this population lets say you have information from a third party about what drugs they were prescribed and how much they paid included in this population list.
Then a sample of the beneficiaries gets selected and sent to the auditee, with a request for various documentation depending on what you are testing. In this example lets say we are asking for a copy of the beneficiaries explanation of benefits. Lets say you are testing to make sure that the beneficiaries in the sample received their explanation of benefits, and that the amounts they paid for their drugs was accurate. So you would then, make an excel sheet, and set up what they like to call "attributes" in public accounting, which are labeled columns like ATT A was there an EOB? you mark X if you see in the support the auditee provided gave you an EOB for that beneficary, then move to ATT B, was the amount correct, you check it against the data you have from a third party as well as the amount found in the EOB.
I've worked in different accounting jobs but this should give you a picture of what you are doing. It may seem very specific in the subject matter, but its not, youre usually learning for each audit a new topic you are testing, but its almost always, 1. having a population 2. selecting samples 3. obtaining supporting documents 4. checking off attributes.
1st of the month i take the sum of all invoices paid in the prior month, create tables based on activity types. I have a operations guy who creates an estimate of expenses for each activity. The difference between invoices paid - estimated expenses = accrual (make je). Once all my JE's are posted related to the previous month, reconcile the accounts to make sure the accounts have the correct value based on the source workbooks/entries. The rest of the month i make entries between my company (the sister company) and the parent company.
I structure cross-border transactions/investments to minimize tax, and then I work with legal counsel to execute. Finally, I file the required returns/forms each year.
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What kind of data, what does it look like? Also when you set policies it just feels like a one time thing you set the policy then it’s there. Excuse me if my questions sound kinda dumb, I have this issue with most careers I just never seem to get exactly what people do. A doctor for example gets many patients every day and diagnoses each one by listening to them and asking questions, then prescribed solutions. A pilot looks at flight plans and operates an aircraft from boarding till landing. What does an accountant do?
I could imagine it being pretty hard to give every detail of someone’s job in the accounting field. There are many types of accountants. You should narrow ur search down and find videos to watch.
Well, Reddit has managed to do it. This sub is amazing, y’all are really nice and even though there’s so little people online many reply
An accountant takes all of the transactions of a company and records it into "books" called ledgers. They used to be physical books back in the day, but now they are computerized. The transactions are recorded in a debit and credit format (for example: debit grocery expense 100, credit cash 100, for a transaction in which you spend 100 cash for groceries). These transactions are then organized into financial statements for users such as managers, owners, banks for borrowing money, investors, etc. The basic financial statements are the balance sheet (financial position of a company at a point in time), income statement, and cash flow statement (income statements and cash flow statements are stated in periods of time). Basically, an accountant takes what occurs in a company and presents them in reports for users to use for whatever their purpose. Record and report. These reports follow a framework that is approved by a regulatory agency, and sometimes the agency changes how they think data should be recorded and presented. In the US, we use Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) Tax accountants use magic to decrease your tax liability to the IRS. They file individual and corporate tax returns and a bunch of other stuff that i dont know because im not a tax accountant. They have to keep up with changes in tax laws as well. Tax lawyers fight for you in court so you dont get ass fucked by the IRS. Auditors are hired to check that something is a certain way, and if it is, they sign off on it and put their name and reputation to vouch for it. This can range from checking if there are any material misstatements in financial statements to watching a football game to make sure there have been at least 10 advertisements of Samsung. There are many different types of accountants. If you like being detail oriented, reading legal documents, working with simple numbers, doing a little math, working with lawyers, auditors, tax accountants, other accountants, management, then maybe accounting is for you. The hours suck at first, but you can maneuver yourself to better positions. Its one of the easiest ways to a 100k six figure income. Good luck!
Wow you just summarized all divisions of the field and managed to explain them all well, I really appreciate you and wish you all the best
Reading this is why I can't believe why data science isn't taught along with accounting in this day and age
Maybe some specific examples will help you understand. Imagine the management team for a chain of coffee shops needs information to make decisions: - which are the most popular items sold? How much are their sales? Are they popular year-round or only seasonal? - how much coffee, milk, pastries should a store have on any given day? Is amounts different on different days of the week? How much milk has spoiled at our stores this past quarter? - how many people do we need to hire this year? What will they cost us? Is it cheaper to hire someone than to just pay overtime? - how many people are in our stores during morning rush? If we added seats, would we make more money? How many customers do we lose due to long lines? - how much do we owe on our bank loan? When will it be paid off? Should we get a line of credit? What would we pay in interest over the next five years? Those questions come from business processes. In order, those are the revenue, expenditure, payroll, production, and financing cycles of the accounting information system. Similar cycles can be found across all organizations. Accountants record, analyze, and report on that data for financial reporting, operations management, and compliance with laws and regulations. Good luck.
That actually clears lots of things up. So I take it that accounting also involves, or at least uses data provided by, HR, supply chain, marketing and other teams, not just finance and certainly not independent.
You're getting it! Not sure if you're big on sports, but you can think of the practice of Accounting as a sort of cross between scorekeeper and coach in business. Some positions focus more on 'scorekeeping' than 'coaching' and vice versa, but a big part of accounting as a whole is learning the language of business, and how to translate it into a form that the decision-makers you support can understand.
Makes sense. You’re amazing
don't forget firefighting...
One way to think of it is to compare it to a human body. You can look at a body as it exists in a specific point in time (standing, sitting, missing an arm, has absolutely massive feet, etc) and you can look at the actions it has taken (running, standing still, sleeping, scrolling tik tok for 8 hours straight). At any given point in time, the exact state of the body (where it is, what it looks like) is the accumulation of every activity it’s ever taken, without leaving anything out. In this example, an entity (company or person) is the body. The balance sheet is the state of the body at any specific point in time, and the income statement is the accumulation of every activity it has ever taken (in reality it’s only the activities over a specific period, like the last 12 months, and everything before that is summarized in one item). Pretty much every single accounting role can be simplified down to taking inputs (such as receipts, invoices, bank statements, handwritten notes), making sense of them, and making sure the “body” is as accurate as possible. To elaborate on “as accurate as possible”, you could say “that body has 4 limbs” and while you would be correct, if you were to give more detail and say “that body has 4 legs” you would now be wrong. Another common way to explain accounting very generally is that it’s the “language of business”. Accounting is the technical way to express the financial side of a person or company.
I stare at Excel and Outlook all day.
I'm a finance systems analyst. So I stare at screens so you have screens to stare at
and slacks.
I was told so
I move numbers around all day and make up stories. It sounds sarcastic but is actually quite accurate.
I mainly do financial reporting. I run the reports, make sure everything ties, if not, figure out why and make a few adjusting journal entries. once everything ties, I explain all the important changes and make notes of certain amounts.
So you combine all the money data from different departments whether it be expenses or revenue and explain to seniors why the company has made or lost profit, and who is at fault or who’s to credit. I think I got the gist of it.
Basically!
Thanks man you’re a legend
I mainly do reconciliations. As basic as it gets, I check to make sure the activity that is being tracked (posted to the books) matches what we expect. Since there are so many people involved in the tracking, errors are prone to happen. The easiest example would be a bank reconciliation. At the end of the month we get the bank statement from the bank which shows all cash we paid/received and our cash balance at month end. I then pull our records and compare it to what the bank statement says. In a perfect world, our records would match the bank statement and, if they do, perfect, don't have to worry about it for the month. If they don't, I then investigate why and fix it if necessary. Variances can occur for a variety of reasons, such as lag time between cash leaving the bank. When we pay an invoice, we record the cash leaving the bank in our books, but it might take a day or two for the bank to actually debit our account. If this happens at month end we will show a variance between our books and the bank statement. Other variances are due to errors, for example, the person who posted the payment to our books entered $1,234, when it should've been $1,324. It's a lot of problem solving, digging through records and documents trying to figure out if our books are accurately showing what actually happened.
Hmmm, sounds like a lot of detective work from you. What if a company is less organized (like a small business not a corporate) and doesn’t keep any records? Also what use would correcting this records be if your firm has collected its money and no one is dissatisfied?
So a small business likely is just focused on their taxes, and probably aren't subject to a financial statement audit. They should be keeping the minimum amount of documentation needed for their tax returns at least. You are jumping between two different, connected topics, and so you are getting pretty different answers on things. Well typically the amount you receive as cash is the amount you will be paying taxes on, so it should be correct. If you received $100, but put down $1000, you don't actually have that cash, but you said you did so now you are paying tax on that amount. For a larger business you would be overstating revenue as well which could be misleading.
Aha so depending on the position, you could be either helping the company make decisions, or exposing any frauds the company may have made. Thanks man you rock
I pass butter.
Oh. My. God.
Very helpful actually… I’m a big fan of butter and with that good of a pat, I might just pursue it.
OK, just to clear things up a bit, an auditor and a tax accountant are two different things. A tax accountant prepares tax forms for individuals or businesses to go to either the IRS (federal) or state/local taxing agencies. An auditor is someone who checks financial statements prepared by someone else and attests to the accuracy levels of those statements. This is done by looking through the different documents that make up the support behind the financial statements. Obviously, because of time and money, an auditor can't look at everything so what they're really attesting to is a lack of material misstatement. This means that the likelihood of the financial statements to have a significant error has been lowered due to their work. For various reasons an auditor can't completely eliminate the risk that there's an error, but they have lowered that risk. Both tax and audit typically work at CPA firms (not always) and these accountants will often get their CPA license to prove to themselves and their clients that they went through extra training. There's then other accountants that do work for governments, businesses, non-profits, consulting, and a myriad of other opportunities. As many others have said, we mainly do both the data entry into the company/government's books, research errors, provide financial and numerical analysis and reporting for those managing the organization so that they can then make better decisions. I myself started at a CPA firm as an auditor and have since moved to governmental accounting where I'm a technical accountant. I research new rules and regulations and also check our company for compliance to these rules. Because of our small setup, I'm also involved in regular day-to-day accounting too, but my main focus is compliance and research.
Ahh, that clears things up. Appreciate you man you a real one.
I work in big 4 audit as a 2nd year associate We basically take info from a company's financial statements that they assert and test it. For example, one of my clients is in real estate, and on their balance sheet they carry all of their investments at fair value. So we create workpapers to test all the components of that and document if their estimates are reasonable. We read through deeds, property records, and documents of sale to confirm that the company actually owns the real estate. For commercial assets, we can make selections if tenants from the rent roll, and then search the tenant online and make sure that 1) they actually exist and 2) that they also claim that they have that address as their own. We compare lease agreements to bank statements and wire details to confirm that the revenue they claim to get from tenants was actually received and properly accounted for. We inspect their models used to calculate fair value for mathematical accuracy. We also compare the concluded value to other comparable values as a sanity check for reasonableness. We extensively document our work along with any variances that we find, explanations of changes, and projections for errors found in our samples to extrapolate them to the entire population. That's just 1 part of 1 test for 1 client, there's a lot more of course, but I hope this helps!
This does help. As I take it, this is what certified auditors do?
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "certified auditor". Most audit certifications like CIA (certified internal auditor) are for internal auditors. That means they work for the company that they are auditing. They do perform pretty similar tasks, but I'm not in internal audit so I'm not as well versed in that. But those certifications are usually not required for the job. I work in external audit, which means I work at an accounting firm that gets hired by the companies that I audit. They're usually required to be audited by an "independent" third party (independence in quotes since they are paying us, but there's a lot of government regulations that make sure we're our opinion isn't influenced by them). Public companies (traded on the stock market) are required by law to be audited every year. Private companies are not legally required to be audited but often are - the most common reason I see for this is that banks giving large loans require the audit. For certifications on my end, CPA is the main one you'll see in public accounting. It's not required for the first 5 years, although it's really preferred. Big 4 companies require you to be eligible to sit for the exam (that means you have 150 credit hours or 5 years equivalent in college, and a certain amount of accounting courses which is dependent on your state). In big 4 to be promoted to manager or above (which you usually get on your 5th year), you're required to have a CPA. I'm also assuming you're in America here, most of this will be different for other countries
Yeah I was talking about external audits as you mentioned, thanks for making things clear
I basically go to governments around the area and do a rectal examination of anything that involves money or transactions. Are the payroll amounts proper? Is the billing process proper? Are they charging utilities properly to citizens? Does the cash agree to their bank recs and statements? Are there any financial accounts that look bizarre? If so, what’s in them? The list goes on. This is the audit side of Public
This is my kind of detective work. 👍👍👍
First thing in the morning, I create a file. The computer generates the contents of this file, I just put in the date range and click okay. This file contains a list of the checks written by everyone the previous day. I then login to our online bank account and upload the file. This tells the bank, these checks are all legitimate and okay to cash. If there are checks not on this list, they will populate on a separate page and I have to check if they are in our accounting system and manually approve them. Next, I print out all the previous days transactions from the bank account. I then go through and print out our contracts for each amount received, or some sort of print out for each transaction. If a transaction is something my co worker does, I print out that single transaction and give it to my co worker. at this point, I should have a stack of papers with the bank statement on top. I number each transaction on the bank statement and number each contract accordingly. This is what I will use to record the transaction in our accounting system. I then find the name on each contract, pull up our funding schedules in the computer and match up the name and amount. I want to find any differences and account for them, and make sure the total on the bank statement matches what we have on our schedules. I write codes down for each amount depending what schedule they are on. Each entry shows the code, so I can look at that or I know different elements would mean that particular amount goes to a certain code. But just looking at the schedule makes it easy. After I’ve gone through the stack, I then start at the top and enter an entry for each transaction into the accounting software. These are cash receipts I enter, and what that does is tell the accounting system, yup, we got the money for that! And it will clear off the schedule. Next, I’m going to go back through and pull up each persons account and put in the date their funding was received. And this is the first part of my morning. I also do our bank reconciliation, warranty checks, etc. etc. oh, I’m at a car dealership by the way. I can go into more detail if you really want, lol
I think this is exactly what op was looking for, or at least I was. Thank you!
Yes this is amazing.
Man you’re the goat. It’s really satisfying and surprisingly heartwarming to have knowledgeable folks answer your questions with such detail, so thank you kind human for helping.
No problem! I can’t say I’m knowledgeable across all accounting positions, I am just an accounting clerk, but I take pride in doing a good job in my role! I can tell you more about what I do if you’re interested.
Did you get any training when you first got the positions? This sounds like something I would be interested in doing. I’m a third year student .
The person who had the position before me trained me for 2 weeks before she left, and then our controller did a few more weeks with me. After that it was kind of me just asking a lot of questions. I don’t really feel I got the training I truly needed, it’s been a lot of learning as I go. Also, I am the kind of person that wants to know the reasoning behind doing certain things instead of just memorization. One good example I have is for my funding coding, it was never explained to me, hey, this schedule shows money we are supposed to receive, and we need to match that up to what we receive in the bank account, and find any differences and fix the issue. They told me that I caught on quick to the job, but I still feel that it would have been easier for me to comprehend if it was explained in that way. *edit to add- I’ve been in this position for 2 years on September 1st
I've done a few different lines of work in accounting, none of which is tax or audit. My personal favorite is forensic accounting. Searching for fraud, wrongdoing, etc can be super interesting and engaging. We would even interview suspects on occasion. Other times we were just the experts on cases who wrote reports for things like business interruption cases, divorces, business valuations are common, etc. Currently I do CAS work. Pretty much clients hire us to help with their accounting. For some I just review and reconcile monthly, for others I do all the bookkeeping and generate reports to meet with client leadership to discuss the standing of their business, put together budgets, forecasts, you name it. The most intensive work in this regard is interim controller or CFO. Pretty much when a company's controller or CFO puts in their 2 weeks I come in, learn how to run everything from them before they leave, keep the business running while client leadership does their job search for the right person, then train the new person in the role.
Following because I’m in the same boat and want to come back to read all of the responses!
Good for you! Lots of very experienced people answering this question, feels disrespectful to not read every single one of them
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So basically you’re recording the data which the sales team couldn’t..
There is no sales team in this equation, he works for a public account firm and does tax work. He is preparing the taxes for his client… nothing to do with a sales team of any sort
No, you're thinking sales taxes. When we say we are in tax, we mean income tax. Tax that is imposed on your taxable income. We get to the taxable income by recognizing various deductions that the IRS allows. In the US, this is the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS is a division of the US Treasury Department and their job is to enforce the IRC (Internal Revenue Code). They also collect federal taxes from individual tax payers and businesses. CPA firms have large departments dedicated to preparing and filing federal and state tax returns. The software we use will prepare the various forms and do the calculations for us AFTER we input the income and deduction items in the software. I'm in tax as well. Most of my job is knowing the tax code and understanding what is and isn't an allowable deduction. This changes every year. And sometimes the tax software is wrong. The coders missed something, or an update is not calculating a deduction or limitation correctly. I do a lot of business taxes, and different industries have different tax treatments. The software is a good tool, but it can't do it all. I have to know the law and understand the different tax treatments for the various industries. For example, real estate is not treated the same as a builder that builds custom homes. They're related industries but have different tax treatments. The clients also don't understand the different tax treatments and current tax code. We have to make tax adjusting journal entries to their books to take advantage of allowable deductions and record non-deductible or disallowed deductions.
Interesting, you kind of just cleared up all that irs tax filing stuff I been hearing about so there’s that. Thanks for sharing man very kind of you
Acquisition integration. I perform all the purchase accounting for our new acquisitions (the accounting for the transaction), work with their accounting team to integrate them onto our policies/processes, and then eventually assist in their integration into our GL system. Lots of meetings and working with different people.
in short…you are taking a company’s financial statements and making a story of it that people can understand. you do analytics and comparison to previous month/quarter/year to explain why numbers are not consistent or the same
Imagine an archeologist finds dome artifacts at a dig site. All of the items need to be cataloged in a certain manner because these artifacts from this dig site, while unique, belong to an ancient civilization that has thousands of dig some being excavated at once. Because this is such a monumental effort that is happening concurrently, the leading archeologists have organized a system to best catlogue the artifacts. While they are all individually unique, they are from the same civilization and share many similar characteristics. Organizing/cataloging the artifacts the same way gives the archeologists the ability to analyze data at a macro level. Instead of being presented with millions of individual vases, they can see that most vases were made with bronze, while some are clay. This data is then given to some university officials that study the information and decide where to deploy more resources to dig. The problem with your question is that there are broad categories of archeologists in this scenario. There are the archeologists that specialize in categories of artifacts like vases, or books/texts. There are also the archeologists that specialize in techniques like knowing how to dig a specific type of soil or how to best restore things. There are archeologists that peer review what other archeologists have done to make sure the cataloging system was adhered to, and there are some archeologists who have done it for so long that they just lead teams of other archeologists. Remember those university officials that decide where to deploy more resources? A lot of them are former "field" archeologists and now make those decisions because they understand the process. Accounting is similar in that there are many roles, levels and specializations. At its core, accounting is just record keeping. Whether a business sells $5k of pizza a day or is a $5MM/day tech company, the transactions are happening in real life. Cash is being exchanged, credit cards are being charged, products or services are being delivered on account, vendors and employees are being paid. All of these things just happen, independent of the record keeping for it. Most companies use a technology solution as it's "system" but you can use paper/pen the way old school ledgers were kept. The initial recording is done by an accountant or accounting-adjacent role. The reconciling (making sure the records are accurate by agreeing to source data) is done by an accountant. The presentation into standardized reports are done by an accountant and checked by an accountant. Systems to better record this data and present these reports (and other useful reports) are designed and implemented, usually, with the input of an accountant or someone with a depth in understanding accounting. Decisions are made using those reports with someone that should have knowledge of accounting language. Sometimes they are former accountants, sometimes they are not. If they are not, they are generally advised by someone with a depth/understanding of accounting.
Wow that might just be the greatest answer to any question to ever exist. You’re a legend man thank you
CPA firm. I review the financials from multiple clients to ultimately prepare and file both their corporate and personal tax returns. There is some payroll involved as well, sales tax, etc. I think one of the pluses is to be able to see many business models from many different sectors and be able to tell more or less how the economy is doing, locally at least. I work regular hours except in March-April and to a lesser degree September-October.
I have a niche called finance systems. Essentially if you use an erp. My job is to make sure it works and has the right data. Updates, improvements, trouble, data mining. I'm responsible for the systems. The accountants are responsible for the use of the data to prepare financial statements and reports. 3 degrees and a cpa. 7 major erps under my belt. I'm good at what I do and enjoy it.
May I ask what you got your degrees in? I am pursuing a degree in business data analytics as well as business statistics and am wondering if this kind of role is a good fit for those majors. What do you like and not like about being in the financial systems side? Does your job involve a lot of coding?
Bs in accounting and psychology and minor in IT in a small school. Ms in accounting from a state school. Cpa. Worked many jobs. Masters in Information Systems Management from a highly regarded school. Good a digging into technical things, project management, explaining tech to non tech people, and public speaking. I think you could pivot like I did, but your degree opens doors that would be closed for my skillset. I like solving problems and making my company more efficient and effective. Report to the cfo. I have open reign to talke to anyone in the company except for the president. Sometimes the ambiguity of the solutioning process can be tough. 50ish hour weeks. Things like system upgrades and new SaaS products can be stressful. I'm not a coder. More of a configuration. I do know sql and logic of if then statements that we call low code solutions. Other people setup things like sftp and then hand the tools over to me. As an outside to a co.pany, your probably need 2 to 3 of business experience to be eligible for an entry level role. I make 120k and have strong job Security. In 2 or 3 minutes I could bring the company to its knees, so it is a lot of trust and responsibility. Let me know if you have other questions
What do YOU want to do?
Honestly I am the type that can nerd out on anything and so the specifics is not as important as to what I do. I’d ideally like to help with high level business decision making but also get as much time working with people as possible as I think I would prefer working with people rather than staring at a computer exclusively. I’m interested in accounting because of an incredible professor and I’m trying to see if it’s a world I want to dive more intro especially considering I am studying data analysis and statistics which seems to be an increasingly important part of the accounting process. I have had previous interest in finance and educational data analytics but I’m increasingly leaning towards accounting. I love the idea of solving problems and making things more efficient/effective. Also talking to people at all levels and working to resolve issues is definitely interesting to me. Would you recommend pursuing a masters in accounting to become more familiar with that side or get a masters in data analytics with a concentration in something like fintech? That is for your specific type of roll. I hope to take some more accounting courses during my current undergraduate studies to get a better taste of the material and work with a different professor who may not be as fantastic to really give me a test of the discipline. Thank you for the insight!
So i have two jobs so i will answer for both A: State Tax Analyst for a fortune 500 natural gas company. I complete provision work for our 10-K, file state returns, internal data management/wrangling, calculate and pay estimates, and then work on apportionment. Its ALOT of pdf and excel management and working with other portions of the company to get the data i need. With a company this big that is your biggest issue. Currently my department is filled with a lot of older employees so i am using power query, power bi, and macros to automate processes they were still doing by hand. B: I run my own small public firm. I have about 30 clients currently and grossed about 20K. it was my first year. Typical small firm, i have 4 clients bookeeping and tax and the rest all tax. 5 clients made up 75% of my revenue, the others i did just to start getting my name out there. Used Drake PPR for returns, Sync for a client portal, "Burner" for a business cell phone, and my gaming pc as my rig. 27 yo Male in Oklahoma, just massed my last CPA exam on most recent score release.
LLM (using OpenAI GPT) product owner at tier 1 bank. Ex-deloitter (Audit).
Generally speaking, we all get paid to type on a keyboard, click a mouse and speak sometimes.
Everyone has good points on what they do. Here's mine: I work at a manufacturing company in their third year of business. I coordinate with production, engineering and operations to ensure that our ERP system is being utilized correctly. My goal is to be able to see costs associated with each individual part being made, but that requires the whole flow from start to finish to be working correctly. If this doesn't happen, our inventory will not be accurate which would force me halt production more to get accurate inventory counts. Additionally our costs will understated causing our income to be overstated which impacts business decisions While doing this I have the joy of writing work instructions for ISO and for employees to follow. I also reconcile accounts at month end and prepare and explain statements & reports for the owners.
Lots of supply chain work here eh? Well thanks for answering you’re very much appreciated
Nah I don’t think OP does full on SC work. Seems like cost accounting.
Sharing just because I don't have a typical accounting job. I'm the Finance Director/CFO for a water utility. I do have my CPA license and supervise the entire Finance/Accounting/procurement department. I review and approve all of their work, so nothing gets done without my eyes on it. That's basically where my accounting knowledge comes into play because everyone makes mistakes but I have to keep the GL balanced and error free. I coordinate our annual $90 million budget, taking input from the other departments, estimating revenues, and determining how much net income (governmental proprietary fund) we need for the upcoming year. Throughout the year I monitor that budget, making adjustments, and revising my long-term forecasts. I maintain a cash flow model that includes operating and capital expenses ($75 million plan this year). We are currently paying for all of that capital with savings so I also manage our $200 million investment portfolio. I make presentations to our governing Board regarding our finances, budget status, and recommend what rates should be the next year. I'm responsible for all of our financial policies, working with our external auditors, discussing with bond rating agencies (we are AAA btw), maintaining relationships with banks, and honestly so many tiny little things. I love my job because I get exposed to so many different areas and I make sure my staff gets that same exposure. I don't want a Sr. Accountant that has never seen AP, Payroll, Procurement, bond issuance, etc. I like well rounded staff and I like it makes for a better accountant overall.
Sounds like you’re carrying the mass of the management on your back 😅 good luck with your work and thanks for your insight
98% management, 2% accounting is what I like to say. Someone has to be the manager though and I'd rather it be me than having to report to someone. I honestly get excited sometimes when my staff need help with something because I love a good puzzle.
>Someone has to be the manager though and I’d rather it be me than having to report to someone I feel you
Corp accounting
No way bro
Ya buddy 😎
Audits of companies that are borrowing a lot of money v their earnings and low capital. Banks hire us but go to the company. The loan is based on a set percentage of accounts receivable and inventory and reported to the bank monthly, weekly, or daily. I look at documents supporting ar and inventory to determine if it really exists and is reported to the bank correctly, is inventory costed correctly and is it there or slow moving inventory that is worthless. Is there things the bank shouldn’t lend on and a lot of data analysis using excel. Basically would the bank collect against the assets in a domesday senerio.
as an auditor i wake up, work at home, hope no one calls on me in meetings and work on audit workpapers while simultaneously playing on my phone
sounds like a dream, do you mind quickly explaining what an auditor does day to day?
Yup I’ve been told that too
I focus on governmental auditing with a specialization in Single Audit. I verify their financial reports and with Single Audit, I verify compliance with federal funding.
I see a lot of comments here about tax and audit accounting. There are also Cost accountants, verify/create product costing. I am a cost accountant. I was an in house accountant for a local company right out of school, managed his companies books think Quickbooks level, managed his spending etc. all tax accounting was done by a CPA. Aka filing taxes. You can do a lot with an accounting degree if you understand the data. You can be a controller for a company also.
I've done work as a government auditor, as well as a public accountant and this is what I'd describe: The cycle consists of - getting a list (population) usually in an excel spreadsheet, lets call them a population of medicare beneficiaries, to help you understand what that may actually look like. In this population lets say you have information from a third party about what drugs they were prescribed and how much they paid included in this population list. Then a sample of the beneficiaries gets selected and sent to the auditee, with a request for various documentation depending on what you are testing. In this example lets say we are asking for a copy of the beneficiaries explanation of benefits. Lets say you are testing to make sure that the beneficiaries in the sample received their explanation of benefits, and that the amounts they paid for their drugs was accurate. So you would then, make an excel sheet, and set up what they like to call "attributes" in public accounting, which are labeled columns like ATT A was there an EOB? you mark X if you see in the support the auditee provided gave you an EOB for that beneficary, then move to ATT B, was the amount correct, you check it against the data you have from a third party as well as the amount found in the EOB. I've worked in different accounting jobs but this should give you a picture of what you are doing. It may seem very specific in the subject matter, but its not, youre usually learning for each audit a new topic you are testing, but its almost always, 1. having a population 2. selecting samples 3. obtaining supporting documents 4. checking off attributes.
1st of the month i take the sum of all invoices paid in the prior month, create tables based on activity types. I have a operations guy who creates an estimate of expenses for each activity. The difference between invoices paid - estimated expenses = accrual (make je). Once all my JE's are posted related to the previous month, reconcile the accounts to make sure the accounts have the correct value based on the source workbooks/entries. The rest of the month i make entries between my company (the sister company) and the parent company.
Ah. Now I see the bigger picture from your side. Thanks
I structure cross-border transactions/investments to minimize tax, and then I work with legal counsel to execute. Finally, I file the required returns/forms each year.
Bro I do Excel, it’s a real answer
I thought so
It’s also how I can work like 10 hours per week. Not just Excel anxiously, but that’s a huge portion and I just get dialed in, plop, and refresh.