Racing Turtles

hi i’m in college and considering becoming an accountant which if i recall right is what you are. would you recommend that career path to others? i am hesitant to commit bc i feel like it’s a ton of work and hours for just-okay compensation but on the other hand i have no idea what ELSE i would do. i crave stability. basically I’m just second guessing my major and i was hoping to get the perspective of someone who’s already been through it to know if it’s worth it or if i should just major in marketing or something

if you want stability then accounting is where it's at

i'm in governmental accounting and i work 40 hours a week, no overtime. also i'm union. if you work in public accounting doing taxes then you get a hell month leading up to taxes being due, but other than that it's not so bad (or so i've heard) (i haven't done it). i assume managerial accountants in corporate environments make more money but i'm not checking.

anyway you're unlikely to make as much money as, like. a software engineer. but you might make as much as a baby programmer. as far as office jobs you can do on autopilot once you get going, it's hard to beat accounting. the classes are all way harder than the job, so if you can handle the classes, you'll do fine at the job.

honestly at worst you can use it as a jumping off point into different jobs. the number of jobs where you both actually require a degree, and where the school you went to doesn't matter, is kind of limited once you look into it. with an accounting degree you can still theoretically become a programmer, or a data analyst, or whatever—it's just that you can also become a cpa, which isn't an option if you get a compsci degree. you know?

Am accounting professor now and subjecting unsuspecting students to accounting (well, they signed up, so they should suspect something).

But the other week my department leadership puts a bunch of people in a group together and tells us "do this thing" with no information at all about what we are doing or how and no one on the team had been on one of these teams before. So after the initial meeting where we realize no one knows what's going on, I started digging around and found old notes and information and was like "hey, I think we are supposed to have done this and here's how the reports are supposed to look, and I even updated the excel so that it has a built in If/Then logic test to see if our assessments meet the required pass rate and you don't have to manually enter that" and one of the business profs was like "how did you manage all this? You are really holding us together" or something and I was just like "well... I'm an accountant. I'm used to figuring out what the heck is going on with less than a quarter of the information I need and a piece of bubblegum."

If you like solving mysteries, sudoku, logic puzzles, and when numbers match, try accounting today.

i managed to work miracles with the many spreadsheets i inherited from my predecessor by adding basic if/then functions and =ROUND (she explained to me when she started that there were a lot of things you "couldn't" do math for in excel because there would be rounding errors :| ). you don't even need lookup to make people think you're a wizard.

i offered to automate something for a coworker in excel and she was very excited even though it was very basic math, because doing math in excel was scary to her. so i threw the spreadsheet together and initially i was going to put in those little pop-up things, where you select a cell and it tells you what you're supposed to enter. but i realized immediately that there was no way she would understand this or even know to look for it. then i was going to make a PDF of instructions but realized immediately that she would never be able to find the PDF because she didn't know how to find any files except through her downloads folder. so then i just made a second sheet in excel, so there was one named 'worksheet' and another named 'notes'. and on the notes sheet there was nothing but a single screenshot of the worksheet that i drew all over to indicate where the numbers were supposed to go. then i added a border and slightly tinted the screenshot so that it would be obvious that it was an image.

anyway when she called me over to her desk because the spreadsheet was broken, she was on the notes page dragging the screenshot in frantic circles trying to figure out how to enter her data into the sepia-toned image.

I studied accounting but ended up in Internal Audit, accounting's less popular sibling, and SO MUCH of it involves trying to get sensible evidence documents from people. The other week I asked for a list of expenses for a project, and got back an out-of-focus photo of a single sheet of paper with a few half-visible numbers. They hadn't even bothered to make the paper lie flat.

i feel bad for the auditors because i scapegoat them all the time trying to get the actual paperwork we need. i'm constantly like, "oh man i totally trust you for real and would have no problem doing this stupid fucking thing you're asking that would enable you to do so much embezzling, but you know how we get audited every year, those auditors don't fuck around, if we don't have the paperwork that you know perfectly fucking well we're supposed to have then the auditor will get mad"

but the auditors feel bad for me because the only time they actually need to talk to me is to help them untangle timesheets, when i have to say "well see the typed and printed stuff is what the employee submitted, and then the pale blue ballpoint is where the department head corrected it because their math was wrong (they do not use formulas they just manually figure out their hours), and then the magenta felt-tip pen is where i fixed what the department head fucked up and also found mistakes they missed, and then anything in dark blue rollerball ink is where the head accountant found another mistake that i missed when i submitted everything to be finalized" and then the auditor is like

My sister got an accounting degree, did audits for two years, got promoted a bunch of times, and got so tired of dealing with clients and their paperwork that she quit to become a jr software tester (for software that deals with Accounting Things. It's all a mystery to me so this is all I know about it) three months ago. My understanding is that she likes writing documentation and figuring out the logic of things and where they're fucked up, but she hates Clients, so this is working out great for her.

Also as a sidenote: Im a sr web developer. I work for a huge banking services company. The amount of people I encounter who work in tech and act like you're a wizard if you know how to do anything on excel is unreal. I turned a date in a format excel doesnt recognize to a date it does yesterday (by googling how to do each step) and did some math and conditional styling with it and my coworkers were so amazed we could show that to the manager??? When it's the same stuff they do every day with code???? (Also by googling each step lol. Dates are a nightmare always but also that's just how programming works in practice)

excel is SO funny

i made a joke once about intimidating non-CS majors with a random page of CSS and intimidating CS majors with a complicated spreadsheet but. it's also kind of not a joke. it's wild to me how many accountants AND computer science majors are intimidated by advanced excel functions.

when i have downtime i keep my payroll spreadsheet open with the developer window up because the sight of excel vba triggers a fight-or-flight response in everyone with sense

kitty i recently started working for a new company and i've had to start processing expense reports with sales tax exemptions and it's a NIGHTMARE

i can always tell when the weird business someone found online that no one's ever heard of has never dealt with a sales tax exemption before because step one is explaining that there's such a thing as a sales tax exemption

Seeing your accountant rage at Amazon helped me contextualize our finance department's mandate that all Amazon orders be one item only. I've always followed the mandate but it's nice to know that when I place 10 individual Amazon orders in a 10 minute period that I'm keeping someone from potentially pulling their hair out come reconciliation.

it's so goddamn weird because amazon doesn't actually notify us that they split up the order, you just have to look at all the various amazon charges and all the receipts you have for amazon charges and try to figure out which ones were charged together and which ones were split up. and sometimes purchases are split up into different months which puts them on different statements. and sometimes you don't have all the receipts. and SOMETIMES. for NO REASON I CAN FATHOM. there will be an amazon charge. and i will have the receipt. and there is no other purchase that could possibly match the charge. and yet the amount they charged does not match the amount on the receipt. possibly if the person who made the purchase went back in they would see the receipt had changed for price-matching reasons or whatever but. imagine when this happens and the purchase is grouped with something else. NIGHTMARE.

if we had an amazon charge card i would be able to see the individual purchases right on the card statement (walmart works like this) but that would just encourage buying more dumb amazon shit. i've tried asking people to hold their receipts and wait to write purchase orders so they're grouped by what arrives together but no one does that.

I love how perfectly you captured the accounting experience. Even other accountants are amazed by my accounting skills which is crazy because I don’t think I’m that good. I just know how to thoroughly abuse VLUs and If statements. I’ve always wanted to get a handle on VBAs and macros beyond googling what I need and copy pasting the coding. Did you learn it in college? I’ve also heard LinkedIn has some stuff, but idk if it’s any good.

i didn't learn shit in college!! absolutely baffling how little excel we learned. we took one class for a small amount of microsoft access not exceeding the amount i learned in middle school to build a database of animal crossing collectibles. other students in my accounting classes would opine over how much they hated excel and preferred just handwriting things on a ledger sheet?? fucking wild, good luck weirdos.

anyway my embarrassing confession is that one summer in college i took this udemy course that i paid $12 for and it gave me the foundation for everything i've done since then. except powerquery which i learned later while trying to do something similar to powerquery using vba and someone asked me why the fuck i was doing that. you could probably find something just as good for free on youtube but the presence of assignments and little graded quizzes turned out to be vital in tricking me into actually learning it.

I feel that accounting post so hard. I’m not an accountant but I work in the back office of a credit union and I’ve run into so many similar situations. Like we need a copy of a driver’s license or other form of photo ID for certain transactions/applications. Sometimes people take a photo of it if they don’t have access to a scanner, which is usually fine. I came across one where the person was in their car and holding the driver’s license in front of the steering wheel but the camera was where the driver’s head would be, so it was really tiny. 🤦🏼‍♀️ Like we do actually need to see the text on the license, not just that it exists.

i've had department heads hand me timesheets like "here's duncan's timesheet" and i'm like "who is duncan" and they're like "he's the new guy i hired" and i'm like "i don't know who that is" and they're like "well i hired him" and i'm like "i do not have a single piece of paperwork to tell me who duncan is, what his job is now, what he is paid, how he is paid, or even evidence that he exists" and they're like "he's actually been working for a while now so he needs retroactive pay also" and i'm like "do you understand what a labor law is"

then they call duncan to tell him he needs to come fill out paperwork and he's like "i'm pretty busy this week" and i'm like "we can't pay you" and he's like "you can just make a paper check out to duncan and that's fine" and i'm like "do you understand what a labor law is"

then duncan manages to make time to come in and i'm like "do you have any proof of your identity and also proof that it is legal for us to hire you" and he's like "my bitch ex-wife got those in the divorce, does it work if i show you a picture of an ohio drivers license taken by a potato and texted to me by my teenage son from a canadian number not saved to my contacts" and i am like "work on getting replacements so that we can pay you please"

he then proceeds to fail the mandatory DOT drug test required for CDL holders, which is necessary for the job he was hired for, so his employment is immediately terminated. he still has not produced the documentation i need to pay him. no one ever explains to me how he managed to not have a drivers license if he was hired for a Class A CDL position.

So, as an accountant, do you have any insights/commentary on the Alex Jones Business Trustee thing?

idk if i have any specific insight as an accountant, just that everything i've seen so far indicates that they are actually unbelievably bad at fraud. they have never successfully managed to convince anyone that they are deeply in debt to the however many companies that his parents own that are sometimes named after alex. even non-accountants can see what they're doing. there isn't a lot of complex stuff happening here. all they've ever managed to do with their many bankruptcy attempts and various frauds is waste everyone's time, which tbf was a major goal.

i think any competent accountant will be able to quickly identify the bullshit, but it would be very fun if the general public got updates about the more trivial accounting fuckups or weirdness happening there. because there's gotta be some shit that's not illegal, just pointless and weird. i wanna know about that stuff.