Is Accounting Stressful?

The feeling that I'm never done. There's always another workpaper to review, another request from the client, another comment from the manager. I worked until 11:30 last night. I got to the office this morning and my manager had left review notes on four of the workpapers I submitted yesterday. Two of the notes were substantive. Two were formatting. I spent 45 minutes on the formatting ones because the firm has standards for how tick marks are placed and how cross-references are labeled. The tick marks are, I understand, important for audit quality. But at 8:45 AM after getting home at midnight, spending 45 minutes on tick mark placement does something to your spirit.

The thing is, I knew the hours going in. Everyone told me. My professors, the recruiters, the people who spoke at Meet the Firms night. "Busy season is tough." And I nodded and thought, I can do tough. But nobody explained that the stress isn't the hours per se. It's the hours combined with the feeling that the work is never actually finished. You don't leave at 11:30 because you completed everything. You leave at 11:30 because you physically need to sleep. The work is still there when you come back. It's like running on a treadmill where someone keeps extending the belt.

Signing off. That's the stress. When I close the books at the end of the month and I send the financial statements to the CFO, my name is on them. Not literally, but in practice. If there's an error in the revenue number or a misclassified expense, I'm the one who gets the call. I have a team of three people under me and they do good work, but I review everything before it goes up, and the question I ask myself every month on close day is: did I miss anything?

Last quarter, I signed off on the financials and two weeks later our external auditors found a $67,000 misclassification. Warranty reserves had been booked as an operating expense instead of COGS. My team made the entry correctly in the accrual but the mapping in our ERP was wrong, so it posted to the wrong line on the P&L. The error didn't affect net income, it was just a line-item issue, but the CFO brought it up in a call and used the phrase "we need to make sure this doesn't happen again." That phrase. I've heard it three times in my career and each time it shaves a year off my life. The $67,000 didn't matter financially. It mattered because it was a crack in the trust. I reviewed those financials before I sent them. I didn't catch the mapping. My name was on it.

April. Just April. I love this job from May through December. Genuinely love it. I like my clients, I like the problem-solving, I like the feeling of saving someone money through good planning. And then January hits and the returns start coming in and by mid-March I'm working six days a week and by April 1st I'm working seven days a week and my husband has started doing bedtime for both kids by himself because I'm at the office until 9 PM reviewing returns and if I take a break it's to eat a salad from a plastic container at my desk.

I've done 18 tax seasons. You'd think it gets easier. The work gets easier. The pace doesn't. Every year I think "this year I'll manage my time better" and every year I'm sitting at my desk on April 13th with a stack of returns that came in three days before the deadline because clients don't send their documents until the last possible moment no matter how many reminders we send. I sent a client his document request letter in January. He dropped off his envelope on April 11th. Inside was his W-2 and a sticky note that said "sorry for the delay." Four months. For a W-2 and a sticky note. I love him. But April does something to my personality that my family notices and doesn't enjoy.

The monotony. I know that's not the kind of stress people expect when you ask this question. But the close happens every month. The same journal entries. The same reconciliations. The same variance analysis. I reconcile prepaid expenses. That's one of my accounts. Every month I pull the schedule, I check that each prepaid is amortizing correctly, I tie the total to the GL, and I submit it for review. I've done it 48 times. The 48th time felt exactly like the 12th time. The account has never been materially wrong. Not once in four years.

And the stressful part isn't the boredom exactly. It's the question underneath the boredom. Am I going to do this for 30 more years? Because the person above me, my manager, she does a more complex version of what I do. And the person above her, the controller, does a more strategic version of what my manager does. But all three of us are fundamentally closing the books every month. The scope gets bigger, the accounts get more complex, but the rhythm is the same. Close the books. Produce the financials. Start again. I chose this career because I liked the order and the logic of it. I still like the order and the logic. I just didn't realize the order and the logic would feel exactly the same in year four as they did in year one.

The liability. I sign audit reports. Not the partner's signature, that's the partner. But I'm the one who did the work behind the signature. If the firm gives a clean opinion on financial statements that turn out to be materially wrong, the SEC doesn't come for the staff accountant. They come for the partner. But the partner is relying on my testing. My workpapers. My judgment about whether a $200,000 accrual estimate is reasonable or not. If I get that wrong and nobody catches it and the financial statements go out, the partner's name is on the line but it was my work that put it there.

I had a situation two years ago where I was auditing a construction company's percentage-of-completion revenue. That's a method where you recognize revenue based on how far along the project is. The client said Project 114 was 72% complete. I looked at the costs incurred versus total estimated costs and I got 64%. That's an 8-point gap. On a $3.2 million project, 8 points is about $256,000 in revenue that's potentially overstated. I asked the project manager about it. He said costs were behind because a subcontractor invoice hadn't been processed yet. That's plausible. It's also the kind of explanation that could be covering up an overstatement. I spent a day pulling subcontractor records and eventually confirmed the invoice was real, just delayed. The revenue was fine. But for about six hours I was sitting with the possibility that I'd found a quarter-million-dollar overstatement, and the question wasn't whether I could find it, it was whether I was right. That kind of uncertainty sits with you differently than stress about hours or deadlines.

Doing everything. I'm the accounting department. The entire accounting department. It's me. We're a $4 million nonprofit, 22 employees, and I handle AP, AR, payroll, grant accounting, the annual audit, the 990, donor reporting, and the monthly board financial package. When people say "small nonprofit accounting" they picture someone writing a few checks. I'm managing 14 restricted grants with different fiscal years, different reporting requirements, and different allowable cost structures. Grant A allows indirect costs at 15%. Grant B uses a modified total direct cost base. Grant C doesn't allow food or travel. If I charge a meal to the wrong grant, we could have a disallowed cost finding in our next single audit, which could jeopardize future funding.

The stress is that there's no backup. If I get sick during audit season, nobody can step in. The executive director, Carol, understands program work but she can't reconcile a bank account. The operations manager knows how to approve invoices in our system but he doesn't understand accrual accounting. If I left tomorrow, they'd have to hire a consultant at $150 an hour to figure out my spreadsheets. I've built the entire financial infrastructure of this organization and it lives mostly in my head and my laptop. That's not good. I know it's not good. I've been saying for two years that we need documentation and cross-training. Carol agrees. We never get to it because I'm too busy actually doing the accounting to document how I do the accounting.