Lessons learned in a decade of accounting, Part 1

I graduated college in 2013 from California State University, Fullerton with a degree in Business Administration with an emphasis in Accounting. I didn’t always want to be an accountant, but I favored career stability and climbing the corporate ladder, so accounting seemed like the logical choice. Almost a decade and several detours later, I thought I’d share my journey of how I went from an auditor at an international CPA firm to future-forward financial consulting firm.  

My journey was varied: I’ve worked in public accounting, private and corporate accounting, and I’ve started my own accounting firm with one of my buddies along the way. Before you click away, I can assure you this is not John’s brag session, but rather, an effort to showcase the pros and cons of the two major paths of accounting and how we are forging an entirely new path with Zeroed-In. 

Public Accounting 

Outside of getting my CPA license, public accounting was hands down one of the best things for my career trajectory. In the accounting world, having a big CPA name on your resume gives you instant credibility. I used to be of the mindset that you don’t need a big firm to succeed. It wasn’t until I became a firm owner that I truly understood what having a big name on your resume meant. In addition to the name, you’ll have accelerated learning by facing complex challenges with clients, access to high-performing upper-level management to help establish your network, and most importantly, you’ll learn to solve problems because you’re constantly being faced with them on a daily basis.     

This is not to say that big firms are the only ones that have good accountants, I’ve seen subpar accountants at big name firms and I’ve seen absolute all-stars at boutique firms. However, it’s much harder to even get the door open to some of the possibilities out there without being a former [insert big name firm here] employee.  

Experience  

I will never forget the amount of learning that happened during my time in public accounting. “Drinking through a firehose” is quite an understatement here, but I developed many valuable skills because of this – one of the most important being time management. When you have a million things to do and only 24 hours in the day, you learn how to prioritize, delegate, and even say no pretty quick. Beyond the time management, you learn an abundance of skills like how a business works, the risk areas of a business, technical accounting, team building, management skills, project management and much more. I was able to work with companies of various sizes and industries and this kind of exposure right out of college set me up for success in more ways than I can count.   

I’m just going to address the elephant in the room right off the bat. There is an immense amount of pressure in public accounting. You are constantly being analyzed by your managers and compared to your peers within your starting class or level.   

One of my biggest gripes with the current structure of public accounting is the need to charge a minimum number of hours per week to stay billable, while also staying under budget on projects. During peak season, it’s not uncommon to charge a minimum of 55-60 hours for months at a time. What made things worse is that if you didn’t charge the required hours each week, you’d be asked on Monday for an explanation on why the minimum charge hours were not fulfilled.    

This frustrating cycle creates a culture of grind and has led to accountants being unethical by either: 1) eating time (not charging the time worked on a client) to ensure you stay under budget or taking shortcuts and not fully performing the procedures to ensure you meet budget, or 2) feeling pressured into reporting ridiculously high work hours to ensure that you meet the minimum hour requirements. The minimum hour requirements drive a goal known as utilization, which is billable time divided by total time. As an employee of the firm, you are constantly battling between charging your hours to keep your utilization high and therefore ranking among the top performers, or you eat your time because you were “inefficient,” “exhausted,” or the procedures were more complex than originally scoped to remain under budget, another important metric to the firm.   

You get reprimanded for not charging enough time and one of your annual goals tied to your bonus is utilization. Now I’m not naïve, I understand that firms are in the business of selling people hours, but how the method by which we do this needs to change. 

Although I am not a huge fan of how the current public accounting machine runs, I don’t regret my time in public accounting because I evolved as an accountant in so many ways.   

TL;DR: My overall opinion of public accounting is I’m glad that I did it because it allowed me to grow so much as a professional and personally. It continues to shape how I think about things in my current role (always using the auditor lens) but I just wish there was better structure around it. Next time, I will talk about two other paths: corporate accounting and start-ups.