It might be different for other careers, but if you are an accountant you will have to live with your money decisions everyday. When the salaries of the employees are not paid on time, it is the accountant who will have to bear the brunt of their complaints.
And when you are an accountant, you will have to handle your company’s tax returns, so you have to have a good idea about how taxes work. This is the same whether you are working for a small firm or a large corporation. Therefore, it is important that you understand how taxes work before you choose this profession.
When people heard that I am studying accounting, they often asked if I am going to be working as an auditor. Well, I was not sure whether I want to do that or not, but I could tell you right now that even if I did become an auditor, my experience will still be useful in my career.
First of all, no matter what job I end up doing as an accountant, I will always need to know how taxes work. Secondly and most importantly, auditing requires me to use my accounting skills and knowledge about tax laws both in my job and also during the training period that will prepare me for this line of work.
If you are a corporate accountant, you will have to spend your days making sure your company lives within its budget. But even if you work for a nonprofit, your job is to make sure the organization uses its money wisely. It’s not enough to be scrupulously honest; it’s not enough even to know exactly what everything costs. You must also understand how this particular organization is supposed to use money (or whatever resource it has) in order to achieve its purpose.
You must also be responsible for reporting on how well or badly that went. You won’t be able to say “we spent $1,000 on overalls and got $40 worth of work out of them.” You’ll have to figure out what the overalls cost per hour worked by the person who wore them–and then what he would have earned if he’d gone out and gotten jobs paying his market wage for that work instead of working for you.
If you decide to be an accountant, expect to spend your whole life dealing with paper and spreadsheets and meetings with people who want to talk about money but don’t want to hear about time and effort.
An accountant has one of the world’s great jobs. It’s a job where you can make a real difference in people’s lives, by taking money they don’t have and turning it into money they do. And you can do it without having to push paper or deal with customers.
That makes it an appealing job to get into if you’re not too interested in material reward. After all, if money is just a scorecard, then this is the best possible scorecard: it measures how much better off your clients are than when they came to you.
But that makes it an even more dangerous job to get into if you’re not careful. Because what an accountant really does is decide how much risk people should take with their money, and the more you empathize with your clients, the more tempted you’ll be to tell them to take less risk than they should.
It’s easy to understand why some people think that any kind of risk is bad. But that’s like saying that any kind of change is bad; change comes in many different flavors, and some kinds are worse than others. If your job is teaching people how to manage risk, then telling them that risk is always bad is like handing out matches on gasoline-soaked rags.
A friend of mine is an accountant. It isn’t his dream job, but he likes it well enough. He likes the people he works with. And he’s good at it.
At the moment he’s working on a deal that involves moving money to another country—it’s complicated, but it has to do with buying a company in one country and selling a company you already own in another country, and there are various ways to move money between them to fund part of the deal. The client is an American corporation, so the money is theirs. My friend’s job is to advise them on which way is best for their shareholders.
My friend knows more about this than I do, but my feeling is that the complications are mostly just smoke and mirrors; they serve to make this particular decision look like it needs more thought than it does. But if my friend said that, the client would probably take their business elsewhere, and he needs this client and their business. So he recommends one option and hopes for the best.
What gets me is how much of his life this situation is going to end up taking up. He will spend weeks on this one decision; there will be phone calls and e-mails and meetings; there may be travel involved as well.
When you are a scientist, the world rewards you not for having opinions but for having accurate ideas. In physics, if you guess wrong about the nature of light, someone else will soon come along and make a better guess. If you guess wrong about which airplane design is most efficient, your mistake will probably lead to death.
But there is one field of human endeavor where guessing wrong doesn’t really matter. That’s accounting.
In physics it’s a big deal to get a number slightly wrong, because a slightly wrong number can lead to disaster. If your calculations say the bridge is going to hold and it doesn’t, people die. If your calculations say that airplane design can save fuel and it doesn’t, again people die. In those cases it’s better if your guesses are slightly conservative: better safe than sorry.