Accountant by Day

In auditing, and in many companies, the professional staff are judged based on billable hours - how much time they spend working on projects that can be directly billed to the customer. In January, I wrote a post about what it’s like to be an auditor during the time of year where the inevitable inventory counts occur. This post deals with another important aspect of an auditor’s daily life - billing your time.

I’ve written about billable hours and realization before here, but this post deals with some examples of billable hours targets, and situations that I’ve run into recently where it can be tricky to decide how much to bill. Hitting the magic number At my firm, we are expected to reach 1,600 billable hours per year. This may be lower than some other firms (anyone care to comment on their firm’s target?

Today was pretty much exhausting. I flew to a client location and back in one day for an inventory count. It was surprisingly less hassle than I thought it would be, considering how messed up my flights were last time I traveled, but I still had to get up really early for the flight out! What are inventory counts and why do you need to fly there? For those who don’t know, inventory counts are what manufacturing companies do around the end of the year to see exactly how much inventory they have.

This post is part of a series where I write about the daily life of an auditor, based on my own experiences, of course. I am getting ready to start my second busy season. There is always so many new things to learn!

Things have been pretty quiet around here after some recent deadlines. However, audit season begins in January, and before then we have all kinds of planning work to get to.

In my first year, I was not very involved with audit planning, even though us first years began on October 1st. This year I have 3 clients that I will head to during November and December for preliminary audit work. I should also have some extra inventory counts this year, since I have been asking around if anyone needs someone to count inventory. (Yay, more billable hours!)

Audit busy season is winding to a close, and it was definitely a season NOT like the two before it. Or maybe 3 if you count my busy season internship? My first two busy seasons with the company, I worked a lot, learned a lot, was stressed out a lot by dealing with what felt like 100 different managers with 100 completely different personalities and quirks. My third busy season, I worked way more hours, realized that managing people is way harder than being managed, and realized there were several key areas where I did not know what I was doing at all.

Photo by Armchair Aviator via Flickr.com Yesterday I rode in a convertible for the first time ever. I can see how seductive the draw of driving a fancy convertible could be now. As we drove up the highway blasting music that everyone could hear (well, if they had their windows open for some reason), I found myself thinking "how dare you drive in the fast lane slow truck! Don't you see that there's a convertible behind you?

How many people do you know who are always worrying about how to pay the next bill, or at the very least, aren’t sure how they’re going to pay that extra high gas bill? Maybe you’ve heard them comment about how much debt they have? We probably all know many people like that. And how many people do you know with those complaints that make upwards of $400,000 a year?

About six months ago I moved offices, placing me about 75 feet closer to one partner and further from another partner. This resulted in many more assignments coming my way from the partner I moved closer to, and fewer assignments from the partner I moved further away from. I started wondering - if the effect of my location is so dramatic within a single floor of an office building, then how does this affect people who work remotely?

I believe that part of finding your ideal career and achieving success is the ability to be flexible, and take advantage of opportunities that come along when you least expect it. The ability to jump at a great opportunity takes both financial and mental flexibility. What if a recruiter contacted you out of the blue with a job that was exciting and stimulating, especially compared to your current daily grind? But what if that job required a 5k pay cut (at first) and was on the other side of the country?

We have received resignations from two of our employee’s in the past few days, so the partner group has been scrambling to rearrange schedules. I think we can absorb these two losses, but I’m not sure if we could handle a third. I would guess that we would already know about it by now if someone else was planning to leave. Typically, for CPA’s, January through April is the busiest time of year, whether you are working on tax returns or audits.