Day in the Life of an Accountant
Three accountants wrote down everything they did on one ordinary workday. No interviews, no prompts. Just the day as it happened.
These characters are composites, built from dozens of real accounts, interviews, and community threads. The people aren't real. The experiences are.
What you'll learn
- A specific day in three accountants' working lives, broken down hour by hour
- The work that doesn't appear in the job description but takes up real time
- What the job feels like from the inside on a normal, unremarkable day
Jess's Wednesday
Alarm. Snooze. Second alarm. Get up. The commute to King of Prussia from my apartment near Temple is about 40 minutes if traffic cooperates. It usually doesn't. I eat a granola bar in the car and drink coffee from a thermos that I made last night because morning-me is not capable of operating a coffee maker.
Arrive at the client site. Badge in through the visitor entrance, which after four months on this engagement still makes me feel like a guest in someone else's office. Because I am. We have a dedicated conference room on the third floor. Three of us from the firm are here today: me, the other staff associate Caleb, and our senior, Megan. The room has a long table, a whiteboard nobody uses, and a view of the parking garage. Megan is already here. She always is.
Check my to-do list in the firm's workpaper software. I have six items assigned to me this week. Today I'm starting on testing fixed asset additions. The client added about $12 million in property, plant, and equipment this year, mostly lab equipment for a new facility they're building in Exton. My job is to select a sample of additions, trace each one to a purchase order, invoice, and receiving document, and confirm the asset was properly capitalized and is depreciating on the correct schedule.
Pull the fixed asset register from the client's SAP system. It's a spreadsheet with 340 line items. I need to select a sample. The firm has a sampling methodology based on the account balance and our assessment of risk. For $12 million in additions with moderate risk, my sample size is 25 items. I use the firm's random selection tool to pick 25 line items from the register. The largest is a $1.8 million piece of analytical equipment. The smallest is a $4,200 laptop cart. I print the list and start requesting documentation from the client.
Email the client's fixed asset accountant, a woman named Helen, and request purchase orders, invoices, and receiving reports for my 25 items. Helen responds in about 10 minutes saying she can have most of them by end of day but a few of the older items might take longer because they were processed before the new document management system went live. This means she'll have to dig through physical files. I tell her no rush on those and mentally note that "no rush" in audit means "I need them by Friday or my senior will ask me why they're still outstanding."
While waiting for Helen, I work on clearing review notes from Megan on my accounts receivable testing. She left four comments. One: "Please tie the AR aging to the GL balance and include the reconciling items." I pull up the aging, pull up the GL, and they're off by $86,000. Spend 20 minutes figuring out why. A credit memo was posted after the aging was run. Add a note in the workpaper explaining the timing difference. Second comment: "The confirmation response from Southwest Medical shows a balance of $142,000 but we have $138,000. Please investigate the $4,000 difference." I check the detail. The $4,000 is a payment that the customer sent on December 30th that we recorded on January 2nd. Timing difference. Normal. I document it and move on. Third and fourth comments are formatting. I fix the column widths and add a cross-reference to the lead schedule.
Lunch in the client cafeteria. The pharma company cafeteria is, genuinely, one of the better ones I've been to. Today I get a turkey wrap and a cookie. Caleb gets soup. We eat quickly because Megan scheduled a team check-in for 12:45. Caleb is testing inventory and he's stressed because the client's cycle count documentation is disorganized. I tell him my fixed asset documentation is probably going to be the same. We bond over documentation quality for about four minutes, which is the most social interaction I'll have today.
Team check-in with Megan. She reviews the status tracker. I'm on track. Caleb is behind because of the cycle count issue. Megan asks if he needs help. He says he'll be fine by Friday. Megan makes a note. The check-in takes 15 minutes. We go back to work.
Helen sends over the first batch of documents. 18 of my 25 items. I start testing. For each item, I open the purchase order, match the description and amount to the fixed asset register, open the invoice and match the vendor, amount, and date, and then open the receiving report and confirm the asset was received. Then I check the depreciation calculation: is the useful life reasonable? Is the method consistent with the client's policy? Is the in-service date correct? Each item takes about 12 to 15 minutes. The $1.8 million analytical equipment takes 25 minutes because the purchase order has three change orders and I need to trace all of them.
I've tested 14 of the 18 items Helen sent. No exceptions so far. Everything ties. The depreciation calculations are correct. The useful lives are consistent with prior year. This is going well, which means it's boring, which is actually good in audit because interesting usually means something is wrong. I save my workpaper, back it up, and start writing the conclusion section for the items I've completed. The conclusion is a paragraph that says, essentially, "I tested these items and they're properly recorded." It takes me 20 minutes to write a paragraph that says something I could say in one sentence because the firm's documentation standards require specific language about the nature, timing, and extent of the procedures performed.
Pack up. Megan is still here. She's reviewing something on her second monitor with the expression of someone who found something she doesn't like. I don't ask. I'll find out tomorrow if it affects me. Drive home. Call my mom. She asks how work was. I say, "I traced purchase orders to invoices for six hours." She says, "That sounds thorough." It was. Nobody will remember it.
Craig's Thursday
Get to the office. Day 4 of close, which means the pressure is on but manageable. Days 1 and 2 are chaos. Days 3 and 4 are when the reconciliations are due. Day 5 is when the controller, Vanessa, reviews everything and asks questions. I need my accounts clean by end of day tomorrow.
Pull my close checklist from the shared drive. I have 14 items this month. Six are done from yesterday. Eight remaining. Start with the accrued liabilities reconciliation. Total balance is $2.3 million. I pull the detail, which is a list of expenses the company has incurred but not yet paid: utilities, professional fees, freight, and about 40 smaller items. Each one needs to be supported. The utility accrual is based on last month's invoice because this month's hasn't arrived yet. I use last month's number, $67,000, and make a note that it's an estimate. The professional fee accrual is based on an engagement letter from the law firm that says we owe $15,000 for January work. I tie that to the letter. The freight accrual is the one that always gives me trouble.
Freight accrual. This is the problem child of my close every month. We ship finished goods to distributors using four different carriers. The carriers invoice us 15 to 30 days after delivery. So at the end of any given month, there are shipments that went out but haven't been invoiced yet. I need to estimate what we owe. I pull the shipping log from our warehouse management system. 847 shipments in January. Cross-reference against invoices received. I have invoices for 790 of them. The remaining 57 are uninvoiced. I estimate the freight cost based on average cost per shipment by carrier. FedEx Freight averages $340 per shipment. Old Dominion averages $290. Two smaller carriers average about $180 each. Total estimate: $18,600. Last month's accrual was $16,400. The $2,200 increase makes sense because January had higher volume. I document the calculation and post the journal entry.
Meeting with Vanessa. Monthly close status check. She goes around the room. The AP accountant, Linda, is done with her accounts. Linda has been here 22 years and she closes AP in about two days because she's done it approximately 264 times. The payroll coordinator, a newer hire named Theo, is behind on his benefit accruals because the dental insurance carrier changed their billing format and he's trying to figure out what the new columns mean. Vanessa tells him to call the carrier. Theo says he already did and was on hold for 40 minutes and then got disconnected. Vanessa says call them again. I report my status: 8 of 14 done, remaining 6 by tomorrow end of day. Vanessa nods. That's how positive feedback works here. A nod means you're on track. A follow-up email means you're not.
Intercompany reconciliation. We have a subsidiary in Mexico that makes some of our components. Every month, intercompany needs to wash to zero. I pull the US-side balance: $412,000 receivable. I pull the Mexico-side balance from their controller, a guy named Arturo who emails me a PDF every month on the 3rd. His balance shows $409,000 payable. Difference: $3,000. Better than last month, which was $14,000. I dig into the detail. There's a $3,000 entry on the US side dated January 31st that Arturo doesn't have. It's a management fee allocation that our FP&A team posted. Arturo's team hasn't picked it up because they didn't get the notification. I email our FP&A analyst asking her to forward the allocation detail to Arturo. She does it within 10 minutes. I note the item as pending on Arturo's side and mark the reconciliation as "reconciled with open item." Vanessa will accept that. The $3,000 will clear by day 6 when Arturo posts it.
Lunch at my desk. Leftover chili from Sunday. I eat it cold because the microwave line in the break room is four people deep during close week and I'm not spending 10 minutes waiting. While eating, I review the depreciation schedule. Fixed assets is one of my simpler accounts. We run a depreciation batch in SAP on the 2nd of every month. It posts automatically. My job is to review the output, make sure no assets were added or disposed of without being properly recorded, and reconcile the total to the GL. The batch ran $184,000 this month. Last month was $182,000. The increase is from a forklift we capitalized in December. I check the forklift's depreciation against its useful life (7 years, straight-line) and it's calculating correctly. Account is clean.
Prepaid expenses reconciliation. I like this account because it's predictable. Most of our prepaids are insurance and software subscriptions that amortize evenly over 12 months. I have a spreadsheet that auto-calculates the monthly amortization for each prepaid. I run it, tie the total to the GL, and check for any new prepaids that need to be set up. One new one: an annual cybersecurity software license for $36,000 that IT purchased in January. I set it up on a 12-month amortization schedule. $3,000 a month. Post the entry. Account reconciled. Total time: 25 minutes. This is the account I dream about. Clean data, predictable entries, no phone calls required.
Start on the revenue accrual, which is my last complicated account this month. We recognize revenue at the point of shipment. But some shipments at the end of the month haven't been invoiced yet. Same concept as the freight accrual but on the revenue side. I pull the shipping log, cross-reference against invoices, and identify 23 shipments that went out between January 28th and January 31st that haven't been invoiced. Total estimated revenue: $148,000. I use selling prices from the sales orders to estimate. The calculation takes about 45 minutes because I have to look up each order individually in SAP. There's probably a report that could pull this automatically but nobody's built it and I've never had time to figure out how. I add "build revenue accrual report" to my list of projects I'll never get to.
12 of 14 close items done. Two remaining for tomorrow: a commission accrual that requires data from the sales team (they haven't sent it yet, I emailed at 3 PM, no response), and the final review of my balance sheet fluctuation analysis, which is a schedule showing every significant change in every one of my accounts compared to last month, with explanations. Vanessa reads this carefully. The explanations need to be specific. "Increase due to higher volume" is not specific enough. "Increase of $2,200 due to 57 additional uninvoiced shipments in January versus 42 in December" is specific enough. I leave at 5:15. Drive home. The Pistons are playing the Celtics tonight and I'm going to watch the first half and not think about freight accruals. That's the plan anyway.
Wendy's Tuesday
At the office before anyone else. March means I'm usually first in and second to last out, after the partner, Glen, who seems to live here from February through April. Today I have seven returns to review that the staff prepared yesterday, one client meeting at 10, and an IRS notice response that's been sitting on my desk for three days because I keep getting pulled into return reviews.
Start reviewing returns. First one is straightforward: married couple, two W-2s, a rental property, standard deductions. The staff accountant, Bryce, did a solid job. I check the rental against the Schedule E from last year to make sure the depreciation carried forward correctly. It did. I check the mortgage interest against the 1098. Matches. I check the real estate taxes against the county statement the client provided. Matches. I approve the return and queue it for Glen's final sign-off. Takes about 15 minutes.
Second return is more complex. S-corporation owner. The business return was filed separately last month by Glen. Now I'm doing the personal return, which picks up the K-1 from the S-corp. The K-1 shows ordinary business income of $186,000, which flows to Schedule E page 2. But there's also a separately stated item for charitable contributions of $8,400 that the shareholder can deduct on their personal return if they itemize. They do itemize because their mortgage interest and state taxes alone put them above the standard deduction. I verify that Bryce picked up all the K-1 items correctly. He missed one: a section 179 deduction of $23,000 for equipment the S-corp purchased. It's on the K-1 but Bryce didn't flow it to the personal return. This would have reduced the client's taxable income by $23,000 and saved them about $5,500 in federal tax. Not a small miss. I flag it, fix it, and make a note to talk to Bryce about checking every line of the K-1 against the return, not just the big ones.
Third and fourth returns are clean. Fifth return has a question I need to research. The client sold a vacation property that they'd also rented out for part of the year. The gain needs to be split between personal use and rental use based on the number of days in each category. The client's records on this are vague. Their notes say they rented it "about 60 days" and used it personally "maybe three weeks." I need actual numbers because "about" and "maybe" don't work on a tax return. I call the client. She checks her Airbnb history and comes back with 58 rental days and 24 personal days. That gives me a 70.7% rental allocation for the gain. The difference between 60% and 70.7% on a $94,000 gain is about $10,000 in taxable income. This is why I don't use "about."
Client meeting. A new client, recently divorced, needs her 2025 return done and has questions about filing status for 2026. She was legally divorced on November 15th, 2025, which means she files as single for 2025, not married filing separately. She didn't know this. She thought since she was married for most of the year, she'd file as married. I explain the rule: filing status is determined by your status on December 31st. She was divorced on December 31st, so she files single. She has two kids and they live with her most of the time, so she qualifies for head of household, which gives her a larger standard deduction and better brackets. She didn't know about head of household. She's been reading articles online that confused her. I walk through the brackets, show her the difference between single and head of household on her income level ($78,000), and she'll save about $1,800 by filing correctly. She tears up slightly, not because of the $1,800 but because this is one of many things she's figuring out alone for the first time. I hand her the candy jar. She takes a Jolly Rancher. The meeting runs 40 minutes instead of the scheduled 30.
Back to returns. Sixth and seventh are clean. I'm now caught up on yesterday's batch. Bryce drops off four more on my desk with a Post-it that says "sorry." I add them to tomorrow's stack. The stack is 11 returns deep now. It'll be 15 by Friday. It's always 15 by Friday.
Finally get to the IRS notice. It's a CP2000 for a client who received a 1099-NEC for $12,000 from a consulting gig. The client reported the income on Schedule C, which is correct. But the IRS's automated matching system flagged it because the payer filed the 1099-NEC under the client's Social Security number but with a slightly different name spelling. The IRS thinks it's unreported income. It's not. I've seen this exact situation about 20 times. The response letter is templated at this point. I attach the client's Schedule C showing the $12,000 reported, attach the 1099-NEC, and write a one-page explanation. Total time: 25 minutes. The IRS will take 60 to 90 days to process it. The client will call me in three weeks asking if I've heard anything. I will not have heard anything.
Lunch. Glen and I eat at the conference table because neither of us wants to leave the building and lose momentum. I have a sandwich from home. Glen has a Subway footlong that he's been eating in installments since yesterday. I don't comment on this. Glen asks me about the K-1 miss on the S-corp return. I tell him I caught it and fixed it. He nods and says "good catch" and goes back to his sandwich. That's the performance review.
Afternoon is a mix of smaller tasks. I process three extension requests for clients who won't have their documents ready by April 15th. Each extension takes about five minutes in our software. I respond to four client emails with questions ranging from "can I deduct my home internet?" (partially, if you have a qualifying home office) to "what happens if I can't pay what I owe?" (the IRS has installment plans, let me walk you through it). I review a quarterly payroll tax return for a small business client. Everything ties. I file it.
Start organizing tomorrow's work. 11 returns to review, a tax planning call with a client who wants to set up a SEP IRA before the filing deadline, and a follow-up with the divorced client about her withholding for 2026. I write up notes from today's client meeting and save them in our practice management software. Glen is on the phone with what sounds like an unhappy client. From the fragments I hear, someone owes more than they expected. That call happens about twice a week during March.
Leave. Glen is still here. The office smells like Subway and printer toner, which is the unofficial scent of tax season. Drive home. My husband, Corey, made tacos. The kids already ate. I eat standing in the kitchen because I want to sit down but if I sit down I'll fall asleep. Corey asks how many returns I reviewed today. I say seven plus four more hit my desk. He says, "So you're further behind than when you started?" Technically yes. I eat another taco and don't think about the K-1 miss until I'm brushing my teeth, and then I think about it for about 30 seconds and decide it's fine. It is fine. I caught it. That's the point.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does an accountant do all day?
It depends on the setting. Big 4 auditors test financial documentation and write workpapers. Corporate accountants reconcile accounts and investigate variances during the monthly close. Tax accountants review returns, advise clients, and respond to IRS notices. Across all settings, the work is more investigative than mathematical.
How many hours do accountants work?
In public accounting, 55-70 hours during busy season and 40-45 the rest of the year. In corporate accounting, 40-45 year-round with occasional longer weeks during close. Small-firm tax is heavily seasonal: 50-65 hours from January through April, 35-40 the rest.