ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

I got another hit today for the string “daily life for an accountant”.  I get a lot of hits from searches like “what is an accountant’s day like” or “accountant day to day life” or “life as an accountant”, which I interpret as the research efforts of young, prospective accountants who are trying to find out what kind of terrifying or potentially boring impact this career choice could have on their tender little lives.  And when I get these searches I feel a little bad because when you think about it, a website with a name like this really strongly implies that a person could get that kind of information here.  But it’s conspicuously absent.  I am failing these people.  

Problem is, I talk about a lot of other shit here and I don’t discuss my work that much.  Mostly because I figure regular people would be so hideously bored by hearing about any of it.  I’m pretty sure I can’t afford to lose what little readership I have.  Either of you.  But now I’m thinking back to when I was agonizing over things like this and didn’t have anybody already in the field to sit there and give me any frank information about what to expect, what to do, mistakes to avoid, and so on.  I made some errors that I might have been able to sidestep if I’d had some kind of source of information.  And I looked for information like this and didn’t find anything.  

Now, not that anything I wrote about accounting would be all that great, but I would have loved to find something written by an accountant about what new business school graduates should expect if they’re pursuing an accounting career.  

So if you found this post because you’re trying to figure out what an accountant does all day, bear in mind that I’ve only been working in the financial arena for not quite three years at this point.  You should take my advice with a grain of salt.  Also, I have already had two glasses of wine at this point.  So bear that in mind as well.  

So, stranger.  I’m going to pretend you’re either currently working on or considering something like a bachelor’s of science in accounting or business management with an accounting concentration.  Something like that.  Maybe you’re a go-getter and you want to straight through and get your MBA or master’s of accounting all at once before you enter the workplace.  Whatever path you choose, I’m going to operate under the assumption that when you finish the school route you’ll have the credentials most employers would want for a basic entry-level accounting position: at least a bachelor’s and probably not CPA certification yet. 

Instead, I wound up taking an internal audit position with a mid-sized company in the area.  This isn’t necessarily a mistake for most people, but the specific situation wasn’t a good fit in my case.  For reasons I discuss in private entries during 2007.  Regardless, strictly in terms of how you should expect to spend your days working in internal audit, it’s all going to depend on your company and how much importance they place on the audit process.  A variety of factors will play into your role, including whether your company is public or private, for-profit or nonprofit, the size of the company, roles played by other staff, and so on.  

My day to day work consisted of performing various audit tests.  As a staff-level employee, I wasn’t given much role in the audit planning or design process.  A more experienced employee is more likely to be given more of an active role in these areas.  Most of my time was spent gathering documents from our internal clients and examining them using various criteria.  

For example, an area commonly assigned to staff-level employees is accounts payable, because it varies little from firm to firm and is usually a well-established, smooth process that isn’t likely to have many mistakes.  Most companies are relatively good at managing and paying your bills.  One likely accounts payable testing task might involve using the general ledger/accounts payable system to generate a list of all invoices paid in a given quarter.  This is your population.  You then use some form of sampling (I’ve always been a fan of haphazard, even though it isn’t as mathematically satisfying as random sampling) to choose a portion of these invoices as your testing sample.  You then go find these documents and evaluate them to determine whether they meet the criteria listed in your testing attributes.  

Your testing attributes are probably things like 

• Invoice amount due agrees to amount paid
• Vendor name and address on invoice agree to payment details
• Invoice has been coded to a reasonably appropriate expense account
• Invoice has been approved by an authorized employee

You would then look at each invoice and review it to ensure that these attributes are present.  You want to make sure that the correct amount was paid, that the correct entity is being paid and that the person who does checks isn’t paying themselves or a buddy, that a phone bill isn’t being classified as meals and entertainment, and that somebody in the company who should actually know actually looked at the thing and agreed that it is a legitimate company expense.  As you perform more and more of these things, you’ll gain a greater understanding of the concepts discussed in your audit class(es).  I know for me it took actually doing the tasks to have a working understanding of concepts like completeness, accuracy and validity.

When you finished performing this testing, generally speaking, you write up and present your results.  When testing something like accounts payable, it’s unlikely that any substantial writeup is necessary; in fact, they probably have ready-made audit forms for you to use anyway.  But in general, you note and document any exceptions to the attributes that you discovered.  If all was well, your job may be done for the time being.  If there were problems, you may be asked to take another sample to help determine whether the rate of error might have been a statistical fluke.  You may also be asked to work with the internal clients to identify where the breakdown is occurring and to work on possible solutions to the issue.

Depending on the company, some travel may be required.  My position required about 15% travel, all domestic, almost entirely during the summer, and I loved it.  My company owned retail outlets in primarily rural areas, so with the exception of the time I spent in the Baltimore area, most of my travel time was to rural America.  My recommendation as far as travel goes is to be as low maintenance as possible and don’t travel with a lot of stuff.  If you’re high maintenance and you check everywhere you go, your travel companions will hate you and one of them will stick a fork in your neck on the last day of the trip when you complain for the fiftieth time about how dry the Holiday Inn Express cinnamon rolls have gotten.  Discard any ideas that you are special and somehow deserve anything better than what other people are getting, be patient and forgiving when things aren’t going the way you planned, and always, always sign up for the hotel and airline loyalty programs.  

When you’re traveling or working with operational personnel, many of them will be intimidated by you because you’re an auditor and in their worlds, this is bad and scary.  Many of them won’t understand your job, or they won’t understand why you have to check certain things yourself and can’t take their word for it.  Always, always be nice and friendly to these people.  You can be professional and engaging at the same time.  

Learn how to create a rapport with the people in operations and make it clear that you’re not there to trap anybody or trick them.  You’re there to help them be even better at their jobs.  Don’t go around saying stuff like that.  You’d sound like you’re full of shit with that kind of corporate talk.  You have to show people what you are like, not just tell them.  Act positive and watch your body language.  They will be watching your nonverbals closely.  Try to put your auditees at ease.  They will be much more open with you if you show interest in them and their work.  If you gain their trust, don’t abuse it.  

The people you’re auditing will probably be very curious about their findings.  They may just pay close attention to you, or they may outright ask you.  You should be aware of your supervisor’s preferences as far as sharing audit results.  I think it’s OK to share clean findings and mild exceptions that aren’t particularly concerning.  If I find something alarming in an audit while I’m onsite, such as mysterious voided transactions, or cash receipts that don’t look like they made it to the bank, I usually do not say anything before I’ve investigated further and confirmed that there is a problem.  Sometimes there’s a reasonable explanation, and if you bring this type of thing up as a major issue and then it turns out to be nothing, it makes it seem like you’re out to get them.  I do think that it’s better not to pretend that things are in terrific shape if they’re not, but also don’t sound like it’s the end of the world.  Employees shouldn’t feel afraid for their jobs unless there’s some kind of deliberate misconduct going on.  If you’re cleared with your supervisor to share findings, be matter-of-fact and explain any problems you discovered.  Be specific and describe what needs to change for them to have a perfect audit the next time.  Most employees will be receptive to your suggestions, if you present them the right way.  It’s kind of a sense of judgment that you’ll pick up.  I don’t know specifically how to describe it, but you want to approach people from a lateral perspective with the idea that you have the same goals.  Don’t act like you’re coming at them from above, or it puts them on the defensive.  

If you absolutely aren’t comfortable sharing your findings with the staff before you’ve talked with your own supervisor, you might be able to pretend that you aren’t finished yet and get away with telling them you can write-up and give them their results later.  But you may find that sometimes your people skills come in just as handy on an audit as your accounting knowledge.  Sometimes you learn things about the control and operational environments that you never would have picked up through substantive testing.  And if you make friends in operations, they may give you a heads up if they find something or hear that something is going on.  

Having never worked in something I would call a “normal” audit department, which is to say, in an audit department in a company that values audit as a function, I’m not sure what a typical day to day experience should be.  But generally speaking, in an average company you would probably be assigned several areas of audit, which would be reperformed at regular intervals depending on the function: monthly, quarterly, yearly, whatever.  If there are process changes or if documentation needs to be written to provide to external audit, you may be asked to help conduct interviews with process owners and to write up various processes.  

But on a daily basis, you should expect that you will be either conducting substantive or control testing for Sarbanes-Oxley, writing up or documenting findings, or performing other tasks as assigned by your supervisor, such as writing narratives describing the processes for various functions in your company.  Good time-management skills are essential in this job, and also you’ll want to be able to keep good track of who you’ve asked for what, when they gave it to you, and so on.  I recommend keeping a list or spreadsheet for this.  

Sorry, it’s hard to think of more things to say about working in external audit.  But if you think of something you’d like to ask me, please don’t hesitate to e-mail me, or even just to write a comment on this post.  I’ll be happy to tell you whatever you know.  And don’t feel like it’s an interruption.  I love hearing from people. 

By the way.  We are watching Apocalypto on cable and my husband and I both think this village is full of assholes.  We would hate living in that village.  I need some more wine.