What Accounting Is Actually Like

When you tell people you're an auditor, what do they think you do?

They think I look for fraud. Every time. "Oh so you catch the bad guys?" No. Fraud detection is maybe 2% of what we do, and most of that is just asking standard questions that we're required to ask. The rest is testing whether a company's financial statements are materially accurate. Which sounds very dry, and honestly it kind of is, but the actual work is more interesting than it sounds because you're basically a detective trying to figure out if the numbers a company reported are real.

Like, I'm on a manufacturing client right now. They make industrial packaging. Not exciting. But they reported $340 million in revenue last year and my job is to get comfortable that $340 million is a real number. That means I'm pulling invoices, matching them to shipping records, calling their customers to confirm balances, testing their inventory count. Each of those steps has a procedure and I document every single thing I do. The documentation is, and I'm not exaggerating, probably 40% of the actual time. If I test a sample of 25 invoices, the testing takes an hour. Writing up the workpaper takes another 45 minutes. Somebody once described auditing to me as "doing a thing and then writing a very detailed essay about the thing you just did." That's pretty close.

What does a typical day look like during busy season?

Busy season for me runs from about mid-January to mid-April. During that stretch, I'm on-site at the client four days a week. I get to the client's office around 8:30, which means leaving my apartment in Fishtown at 7:45 because most of my clients are in the suburbs. I have a staff associate on this engagement, Danielle, and she's sitting across from me at a table in a conference room the client gave us. In theory it's a dedicated workspace. In practice it's the conference room nobody else wants because it's next to the server room and it's always too warm.

First thing I do is check what Danielle finished yesterday. She's testing accounts payable right now, which means she's pulling a sample of vendor invoices and tracing them through to the GL. She's good, but she's a first-year, and first-years make mistakes that you have to catch because if I don't catch them, Amit will. Amit is the senior manager on this engagement and Amit catches everything. He reviews workpapers like he's reading a legal contract. Which, technically, he kind of is, because our workpapers are evidence that we did the work, and if the SEC ever comes asking, those workpapers are what we show them.

So I spend about an hour reviewing Danielle's work. She had a couple of issues, nothing major. One invoice was for $14,200 and she documented it as $14,020. Transposition error. Easy to make, easy to miss, and exactly the kind of thing that Raj would circle in red and send back with a comment that says "please re-examine." I told Danielle and she fixed it in five minutes. Then I moved on to my own testing.

What are you testing?

Right now I'm doing the inventory section. This client has a warehouse in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, with about $18 million in raw materials and finished goods. I was at the physical inventory count in December. That's where you show up at the warehouse and watch them count everything. I literally stood in a warehouse for eight hours with a clipboard watching people count rolls of corrugated cardboard. I also did test counts, meaning I picked items off the shelf and counted them myself to see if my number matched their number. Out of 40 test counts, two didn't match. One was off by 3 units and one was off by 12 units. The 12-unit variance was because a pallet had been moved to a different aisle after the count started and got counted twice.

Now, back in the office, I'm tying the physical count results to what they recorded in their system. The counts should match the system, the system feeds into the financial statements, the financial statements are what we're opining on. If I find a gap between the physical count and the system, I have to figure out why. Most of the time it's something boring. A receiving entry that posted late, a shipment that went out but hadn't been recorded yet. But once in a while you find something where the explanation doesn't make sense, and that's when the job gets actually interesting.

How are the hours?

During busy season, I work about 55 to 65 hours a week. Some weeks hit 70 if we're close to filing deadline and there are open items. Off-season, which is roughly June through November, it's more like 40 to 45. The firm technically has a "flexibility" program but during busy season there's no flexibility. You work until the work is done and then you go home and you come back the next morning and you do it again.

My friend Morgan, we were in the same accounting program at Penn State. She went to a different Big 4. We compare notes. She's on a financial services client and she says her busy season hours are worse than mine because her client has more complex instruments. I'm on manufacturing, which is relatively straightforward. No derivatives, no complex revenue recognition, no mark-to-market issues. Just inventory, receivables, payables, revenue. Clean. She's testing fair value estimates on structured products at 11 PM on a Wednesday and I'm, like, counting cardboard in a warehouse. Different worlds.

Everyone talks about Big 4 as a stepping stone. How do you think about that?

Yeah, so, the thing they tell you on campus is "do Big 4 for two to three years and then go to industry." And they're not wrong. The exit opportunities are real. My class started with, I think, 28 people in our audit group in Philly. We're four years in and I think 11 of us are still here. The rest went to corporate accounting jobs, FP&A roles, one person went to a startup. Most of them are making equal or better money and working 40-hour weeks. So the math works out for them.

I'm still here because I'm not sure what I want to do next. I like the variety. I've been on six different clients in four years. Manufacturing, pharma, a regional bank, a nonprofit. Each one teaches you a different industry and a different set of accounting problems. In industry you'd be at one company doing the same close every month. Some people love that. I think I'd get bored, but I also think I might be romanticizing the variety because I'm not yet tired enough to crave the stability. Ask me again in a year.

You said you rank client snack rooms. Which ones matter?

OK so this is going to sound silly but it actually matters for morale. When you're on-site at a client five days a week for three months, the snack room is your break room, your lunch spot, and your mental health station. My pharma client in King of Prussia has a kitchen with full-size snack bags, a Keurig with the good pods, and a refrigerator that gets restocked every Monday. I gave them a 4.8. The manufacturing plant in Reading has a vending machine that charges $1.50 for a bag of Sun Chips that expired in October. That's a 1.2. The Goldfish crackers alone are a point and a half. I told Danielle about the ranking system and now she adds to it. Amit does not know about the ranking system and I intend to keep it that way.

What's yours?

How little the client cares about the thing you care about most. I spend 60 hours a week making sure their financial statements are right. I test their revenue, their expenses, their estimates. I write detailed workpapers documenting everything I did. And the client controller, the person I interact with most, views me as an obstacle. Not always, but often. I'm the person asking for documents, following up on requests, scheduling time to discuss things they'd rather not discuss. The controller at my current client, a woman named Janet, she's perfectly professional but I can tell that when she sees my name in her inbox, she sighs. I am a task on her list that has nothing to do with running her business.

And from her perspective, that's fair. I'm not adding value to her day. I'm adding work. The audit is a regulatory requirement. She doesn't want us there. She tolerates us. And my entire professional identity at this stage of my career is wrapped up in doing a thorough job on a thing that our primary customer doesn't want done. That's a strange way to start a career. My mom is a dental hygienist. Patients don't love going to the dentist either, but at least they understand the value. My clients understand the regulatory requirement. They don't always see the value. And honestly, some days neither do I.

You left public accounting for industry. What changed?

The hours. That's 90% of it. I was at a regional firm, not Big 4, doing audit and some tax. Good firm. Nice people. But I was working 50 to 55 hours a week during busy season and I just, I didn't want to do that anymore. I was 30 and I wanted to go home at a normal time and not think about workpapers at 9 PM. So I applied for corporate accounting jobs and got one at a consumer goods company here in Minneapolis. We make, like, household products. Cleaning supplies, storage containers, that kind of thing. About 2,000 employees. I've been here seven years.

What does your job look like on a normal day?

So the rhythm of corporate accounting is the close. Every month, we "close the books," which means we finalize all the transactions for the month, make sure everything is recorded correctly, reconcile every account on the balance sheet, and produce financial statements for management. The close runs from about the 1st of the month through the 8th. During close week, I'm busy. Not 60-hours-a-week busy. More like focused, heads-down, don't-schedule-meetings busy.

I'm responsible for about 30 balance sheet accounts. That includes prepaid expenses, accrued liabilities, intercompany, and a few others. For each account, I do a reconciliation every month. A reconciliation is basically me saying: the GL says this account has a balance of $1.4 million. Here's what makes up that $1.4 million, item by item. And here's my evidence that each item is real and correctly stated. If the items add up to $1.4 million and the GL says $1.4 million, the account is reconciled. If they don't match, I have to find out why.

Most months, most accounts reconcile pretty cleanly. I've been doing the same accounts for years. My spreadsheet template handles the routine stuff. I built it in 2020 when I was bored during COVID and I've been adding to it ever since. It pulls trial balance data from our ERP, auto-populates the reconciliation templates, flags accounts where the balance changed by more than 10% from last month, and generates the journal entry templates I need for recurring accruals. It saves me, I'd estimate, about six hours per close. I love that spreadsheet more than I love some people.

What happens when something doesn't reconcile?

OK so last month, my intercompany account was off by $42,000. Intercompany is transactions between our different legal entities. We have a US entity and a Canadian entity, and when one sells product to the other, both sides need to record the transaction. The US side books a receivable and the Canadian side books a payable, and at the end of the month those should net to zero. They didn't. They were off by $42,000.

So I started digging. Pulled the detail from both sides. The US had recorded a sale of $42,000 on January 29th. The Canadian side hadn't recorded the corresponding payable. I emailed the accountant in our Canadian office, a guy named Guillaume, and asked if he'd missed an entry. He checked and said no, he'd recorded all the intercompany transactions he had documentation for. He didn't have documentation for this one because the shipping documents hadn't been sent to him. So I called the warehouse manager in our distribution center and asked about the shipment. Turns out the product shipped on January 29th but the bill of lading was still sitting in someone's inbox because the warehouse clerk who usually processes them was out sick that week.

So the $42,000 variance wasn't an accounting error. It was a piece of paper in someone's email that hadn't been forwarded. I got Guillaume the documentation, he booked the entry, and the account reconciled. Total time: about two and a half hours. And that's kind of the whole job. You'd think accounting is about math. It's really about chasing down why two systems show different numbers and figuring out where the information broke down. The math is always right. The people and processes around the math are where things go sideways.

You've been at the same company for seven years. Does it get repetitive?

It does. I'm not going to pretend it doesn't. The close happens every month. The same 30 accounts. The same reconciliations. The same accrual entries. I've done this close process about 84 times. There's a rhythm to it that can feel either comforting or numbing depending on how the rest of my life is going. When things outside of work are stressful, the predictability is great. I know exactly what my week looks like. I know I'll be home by 5:15. I know the work will be done by the 8th and then I'll have a slower week. That's really nice.

But when things outside of work are fine and I'm not distracted, sometimes I sit at my desk on day 3 of close and I think, I've done this exact thing 83 times before and I'm going to do it 83 more times before I retire. That thought is not great. I've gotten past it by taking on projects outside the close. I did a system implementation last year, helped our IT team configure a new module in our ERP. That was genuinely interesting and different. I also mentor the junior accountant on my team, a woman named Andrea, and teaching someone your job forces you to think about it in new ways. But the core of it, the monthly close, yeah. It's the same. I'm OK with that. I think. Most months.

How's the money compared to public?

When I left public I was making $68,000 at the regional firm. My starting salary in industry was $72,000. So I got a small raise plus dramatically better hours. I'm at $94,000 now after seven years, plus a 5% to 8% bonus that depends on company performance. Last year's bonus was $5,600. Total comp is about $100,000. Not bad for Minneapolis. I have a pension, which almost nobody has anymore, and the 401k match is 6%. The health insurance is good.

The ceiling though. That's the thing. To go above $100K to $110K at this company, I'd need to become an accounting manager, which is Beth's job. Beth is my manager. She's been here 15 years. She's not going anywhere. The next level above her is the controller, and the controller has been here 20 years. So I'm looking at the org chart and the people above me are not leaving. In public accounting, people turn over constantly, so there's always room to move up. In industry, the stability that makes the hours nice also means the ladder has three rungs and someone's standing on each of them.

What's yours?

Nobody outside of accounting has any idea what I do. I don't mean that in a self-pitying way. I mean factually. When I tell people I'm an accountant, they either think I do taxes or they think I do something with calculators. Neither of those is my job. I reconcile balance sheet accounts and investigate variances at a consumer goods company. That sentence means nothing to anyone outside of corporate finance.

My wife is a physical therapist. When she describes her job, people understand. "I help people recover from injuries." Cool. Clear. Meaningful-sounding. When I describe my job, I get a polite nod and a subject change. Even my wife doesn't fully understand what I do. She came to our office holiday party last year and someone asked her what Tom does and she said "he does the books." Which is, I mean, it's not wrong but it's also not what I do. I don't "do the books" like a bookkeeper does the books. But the distinction between what I do and what a bookkeeper does is almost impossible to explain to someone who doesn't know accounting and I've stopped trying. I just say "corporate accounting" and let people picture whatever they picture. Usually it involves a green visor, which I don't own.

What's different about a small firm?

You do everything. At a bigger firm, there are departments. Tax people do tax, audit people do audit, advisory people do advisory. Here, there's me, Phil, Cheryl, and Neeraj. Phil founded the firm in 1999. He's 64 and he's been cutting back for the last couple of years, which is why I made partner, because someone had to take over his clients. Cheryl is our admin, and calling her an admin is underselling it by a lot because she also does payroll processing for about 30 of our small business clients, runs the front desk, and knows the tax code better than some CPAs I've met. Neeraj is a staff accountant, two years out of school, and he does the first pass on most individual returns.

My client list is about 180 individual returns and 40 business returns. During tax season, which for me starts in late January and runs through April 15th, I'm reviewing 4 to 6 returns a day. Off-season, it's more varied. Quarterly estimated tax calculations, payroll issues, IRS notices, financial planning conversations. I also do bookkeeping for about 8 small business clients, which is not high-level work but it pays steadily and those clients tend to stay forever.

Walk us through what a day in tax season looks like.

OK so yesterday. I came in at 8. The first thing I did was review a return that Neeraj had prepared for a client named Mr. Vincenzo. Tony Vincenzo. He owns three rental properties in South Jersey and he has been my client for nine years. Every year, he brings his documents in a shoebox. I'm not being metaphorical. An actual shoebox. A Nike shoebox. Inside the shoebox are receipts, bank statements, a handwritten list of repairs he did on each property, and a folded-up piece of paper where he wrote down the rental income he collected from each tenant. The handwritten list does not always match the bank deposits, which means I have to call Tony and ask questions like "there's a $900 deposit in June that's not on your list, do you know what that is?" And Tony says something like "oh yeah that was the fence, the tenant paid for the fence." Which means it might be rental income or it might be a reimbursement for a repair, and those are treated differently on the tax return, and Tony doesn't know the difference because he's a plumber, not an accountant.

So I spend about 40 minutes on Tony's return, which Neeraj had already spent about an hour on. The return itself is not complicated. Three Schedule Es, some depreciation, a few deductions. The complicated part is translating the shoebox into accurate tax data. That's the hidden work of small-firm tax. You're not just preparing returns. You're interpreting incomplete, handwritten, sometimes contradictory information from people who are running their businesses and don't have time or interest to learn accounting.

What happens after the shoebox?

I reviewed two more individual returns, both pretty clean. W-2 income, some investment accounts, standard deductions. Took about 25 minutes each. Then I had a phone call scheduled at 10:30 with a newer client, a woman named Priya who started a freelance graphic design business last year. She had questions about her home office deduction. Specifically, she wanted to know if she could deduct the home office because she works from home four days a week but goes to a coworking space one day a week. The answer is yes, she can still take the deduction, but it's based on the percentage of her home used exclusively for business and the percentage of time it's used for business purposes. I walked her through the simplified method, which is $5 per square foot up to 300 square feet, and the regular method, which requires her to calculate actual expenses. She asked me which one saves her more money. I said I'd run both and tell her. That took me about 20 minutes after the call. The simplified method saved her $1,200. The regular method saved her $1,840 but required more documentation. I emailed her the comparison and recommended the simplified method because the $640 difference isn't worth the record-keeping headache for her first year in business.

That's, like, that's the kind of decision that makes small-firm tax interesting. I'm not just putting numbers in boxes. I'm advising someone on a business decision that will affect how much money they keep this year. It's small-scale. It's one person. But it's real to her and she's trusting me to get it right.

What about the rest of the day?

After lunch I dealt with an IRS notice. This is a thing that people don't realize takes up a lot of time. A client got a CP2000 notice, which means the IRS is proposing changes to their return because the information they have doesn't match what was reported. In this case, the client had sold some stock and the 1099-B from their brokerage reported proceeds of $38,000 but didn't include the cost basis. So the IRS assumed the entire $38,000 was a gain and wanted tax on it. The actual gain was about $4,100 because the client had bought the stock years ago and the cost basis was $33,900. I wrote a response letter, attached the purchase confirmations showing the original basis, and mailed it to the IRS with the client's signature. This will take 60 to 90 days to resolve. The client will probably call me in three weeks asking if I've heard back. I will not have heard back. Nobody hears back from the IRS in three weeks. I will tell him this, again, and he will accept it, and then he'll call again in three more weeks.

Then I did about an hour of bookkeeping for a client who runs a landscaping company. He uses QuickBooks but doesn't categorize things correctly. He puts everything in "miscellaneous expense." So I go through his transactions and recategorize them. Equipment purchases go to equipment. Fuel goes to vehicle expense. The $47 charge at Wawa is meals, not office supplies. This is tedious but it has to be done before I can prepare his business return, and if I don't do it now it becomes a much bigger problem in February.

How's the money at a small firm?

Before I made partner, I was salaried at $82,000. Which, for Cherry Hill, for a 4-person firm, is reasonable. Not exciting but reasonable. Now that I'm a partner, it's different. My income is based on the firm's revenue minus expenses, split between me and Phil based on our partnership percentages. Phil has 60%, I have 40%, and that will flip over the next three years as he phases out. Last year, the firm's net income was about $440,000. My 40% was $176,000. That's before self-employment tax, which is a 15.3% hit that salaried people don't think about. After SE tax my effective income was closer to $149,000. Still good. Definitely the most I've ever made. But I'm also working 60-hour weeks during tax season, managing the practice, handling my own billing, and taking on Phil's clients as he retires. There's no HR department. There's no IT team. When the printer breaks, Cheryl fixes it. When the server needs updating, we call a guy Phil has used since 2008.

What's yours?

How much people tell you. When you do someone's taxes for nine years, you know things about their life that their friends don't know. I know how much Tony Vincenzo made last year. I know that one of my clients went through a divorce because she called me in August to ask about filing separately. I know that another client's business is struggling because his revenue dropped 35% and he asked me to defer his estimated tax payments. I know who has savings and who doesn't. I know who got an inheritance and who's carrying medical debt.

People hand me their financial lives in a folder or a shoebox or a login to their TurboTax account and they trust me not to judge them. And I don't. But I see it all. The client who makes $220,000 and has $800 in savings. The client who makes $55,000 and has $40,000 in a Roth IRA because she's been putting in $100 a month since she was 25. I see the gap between what people earn and how they live. I don't say anything because it's not my job. But after 12 years of looking at people's financial lives, you develop a very specific kind of perspective on money that's hard to turn off when you go home. My husband Raj asked me once why I'm so careful with our spending and I said "because I've seen what happens when people aren't." He thought I meant I'd seen bankruptcies. I meant I'd seen the quiet version. The person who's fine on paper and panicked underneath. You see that a lot in this job.