WatsItLike

Succeeding in this career depends on your aptitudes and willingness to grind.

There’s this article in Time that talks about this dude who searched for a literal needle in a haystack in a gallery in Paris.  The Italian performance artist’s name was Sven Sachsalber—dead at age 33, cause of death unknown.  But yes, he found the needle.

Throughout college, accounting professors will assign you homework problems, like constructing a depreciation table for a new Rivian purchased for a business or determining if a selfie toaster should be expensed or capitalized or completing a tax return for old Mrs. Prunewell.  Professors rarely, in my experience, assign you problems like: figure out why utilization on labor in the facilities department dropped by .01% by sifting through five hundred timesheets.  They don’t tell you to find $6.42 by going through each of the two-hundred-page client invoices for each month back to 1989.  And they don’t tell you to find that one email from that client that was deleted ten years ago but may be in hard-copy downstairs in the file room in one of the fifty-odd banker’s boxes.    

But the feeling of finally finding that missing $6.42, oh man—when it happens: epic.

There is a shortage of accountants nowadays.   I won’t bore you with statistics from the AICPA Trends Report.  Just know that fewer people are entering the profession. One CPA I spoke with in Rockville, named Alan Nishi, had this to say:

“The decline in the people going into accounting is of some concern, but I’m confident the improvements in AI will soon be able to compensate for the decline of people going into the field. The majority of an accountant’s work is uniformly repetitive. The work outside of the routine repetitive work will still be handled by real humans. But for the most part, from the origination of an accounting transaction to the entry onto a financial statement/tax return will be seamless. At that time an “accounting degree” will simply be proving one’s proficiency of driving a mouse back and forth across your mouse pad!”

Of course, he was being humorous about the mouse pad part, but there is truth to it.   The field is changing.  Before you enroll in that evening accounting 101 class at the community college, ask yourself these questions.

• Are you diligent?
• Do you like numbers? 
• Do you like symmetry and balance?
• Do the topics data science and data analysis intrigue you?
• Are you a good communicator?
• Can you handle stress and long hours?

Not to be flippant but Sven’s searching for a needle in a haystack did not lead to his untimely death, nor will searching for $6.42 lead to yours.  So, worst case, you try accounting, decide you don’t like it, and then move onto something else.  Or, ask yourself this: if you were forbidden by law from studying accounting, would that bother you?