There are 286,000 qualified accountants and 169,000 accountancy students in the UK (source: FRC). That means you can’t avoid them for your whole life. This blog post will explain where accountants come from and what motivates them.

The Defensive Play

It was once believed that accountants were delivered by storks while sucking their thumb and clutching a calculator. Modern biology proved that accountancy is not a natural career choice. Show me a child who aspires to be an accountant and I will show you the telephone number of a good therapist.

Accountants are actually produced from the “Big 4” accountancy factory (the four largest firms who dominate the industry). Fresh university graduates are the raw materials and they take three years to process. They are lured through the gates because the training contract offers:

• Stable employment
• A free chartered accountancy qualification (the “ACA”). Qualification means a large pay rise and near-guaranteed job security for life.
• Good work experience with exposure to many different aspects of a business

For these reasons, accountancy is a defensive play for 90% of trainees. It is a safe option for the graduate who is unsure about their long terms career goals. By simply doing as you are told for three years you will end up with valuable work experience and qualifications. No thought is required and the long-term serious career decisions are deferred.

It is a safe and pragmatic career choice. But that’s the way accountants should be.

The Machiavellian View

The cynical view is that trainees are entirely self-serving and leave as soon as the training contract ends, having conned the ACA from their employers.

However, this Machiavellian view is acceptable to the Big 4 because they easily extract enough value from their trainees. They perform a great bulk of the fieldwork at the client.  Even though the ACA is a great expense the cost is recovered many times over. A trainee is charged out at over £100 for every hour that he works at the client. A trainees will earn around £350,000 in profit for the firm during their contract period.

A lot of trainees do leave after qualification but the business model is not designed for all of them to stay. Otherwise, there would be too many assistant managers.

However, the three years are not just a relationship of convenience. The firms do want you to stay after qualification even if it is not as an accountant. They will make efforts to find placements elsewhere. Possible destinations include other business areas of the firm, such as advisory, placements at the client and placements abroad.

Trainees are not solely treated as a resource but as valued members. This is why the Big 4 do well in employee satisfaction surveys.

The Meaning of Audit

Accountancy is a good career – but why do any work at all? Accountants do have dreams of lying on a beach for half the year and skiing for the other half. But that would be a waste of immense talent. Also, modern civilisation would collapse if there was no-one to audit the accounts.

We agree that work is necessary. On the basic level, we need to earn money for food and shelter from bandits. However, should we expect fulfilment and satisfaction from our work, or is it just a means to an end?

Inevitably, accountancy is just a 9 to 5 job for a lot of people. I have joined in the bitching and moaning sessions while at work. But I have also met those who do enjoy auditing. It is more satisfying to work with them. They get the unpopular label of being “keen”, but it is the geeks who do well at school, not the jocks.

My Story

I wanted to become a chartered accountant after doing some work experience while I was in school. I did the usual amount of photocopying and filing. But I spent the bulk of the summer making over 100 archive boxes to store old files. This proved to be valuable experience because I won the first year trainee box making challenge. I was impressed by the importance of my bosses work and the respect that he got from his clients.

During university, I did some summer work in a chemical factory. I spent many 8 hour shifts lining up plastic bottles and stacking them on pallets. I vowed never to do any more menial work and to go for a challenging career. That’s why I am an accountant.

I didn’t know about the dire days I would have counting things on pallets and sifting through endless invoices. But I like the people and the work can be interesting. It’s pleasing to understand and apply a complicated accounting standard while at work. So like most people, I fall between the pragmatists and idealists on the purpose of work. Like most trainees, I’m still deferring the decision on what I will do after I qualify. But I will enjoy the time in between.

Work isn’t meant to fulfil your Ultimate Life Purpose™. It isn’t your whole identity. But it is OK to have fun auditing.

I am going to give an insight into what the trainee auditor’s life tastes like.

The Main Doughnut Sections

Busy Season
Half of the year’s audit work will be concentrated into these three months. Annoyingly, it is also the darkest and wettest time of the year.

College and Exams
Exams are a horrid burden and will ruin a lot of weekends for three years. However, college is a nice break from work. It’s a good chance to catch up with the other trainees who you otherwise wouldn’t see.

Holiday
25 days is the standard number of holiday time. You don’t have to take it during the summer and Christmas, but you can’t take any during busy season and college time is immovable.

The most interesting doughnut finding is that trainees don’t actually work that much when you add college and holiday time. For that reason trainee auditors don’t get paid as much as bankers or lawyers, but the trade-off is fair.

The September Milestone

Accountancy firms are the largest recruiters of graduates, therefore, the audit year follows the academic year because most join in September. The new first years do bring a feeling of renewal. The new joiners’ event celebrates their entry by subjecting them to the ritual humiliation of karaoke. They made me remember when I joined just 12 months previously. I realised how far I had come in that time (and how much stationery I had wasted).

September is also promotion and pay rise season. This is celebrated by the awarding of medals and the consumption of doughnuts.

Social Events

Large social committee budgets and mandatory contributions means that there are lots of social events throughout the year.

Alcohol
The highlight is the Christmas party, which is ridiculously messy but will give you lots to talk about until next year. There are regular pub meetings, which are mainly caused by a high turnover of staff leading to lots of leaving drinks.

Strangely, there are no regular pre-weekend Friday drinks because auditors are scattered throughout different client sites and are not based in a common location. The other (implausible) explanation is that I’m not being invited.

Corporate Social Responsibility Day
This is where the department take a day out of work to help the community. In my first year, we painted an old persons home. Other departments have gardened, cleared rubbish and done volunteer auditing for the needy.

Department Away Day
The department stops auditing and does something fun for a day. This may include sailing, horse racing and hunting bandits

Inter-Department Sports Events
The rivalries cover football, pub quizzes and netball. Accountants are competitive. The sight of partners dressed in fairy wings and pink leggings is pretty scary.

Looking Forward

Trainee auditors enjoy a varied (and tasty) life. If you are are having a bad week then there is always an event or a change in activity to look forward to. Fifteen exams is daunting when you start but time does pass crazily quickly. Busy season is hard but there are lots of fun times too. I look forward to qualification and the lifting of the exam burden. But the audit doughnut does become somewhat less interesting:

1) Blue, black, red and green pens – The most standard of audit tools, since the staple work involves marking up of schedules, invoices and other paper-based evidence. A red tick against a particular number says clearly that:

• it agrees to the same number somewhere else in the accounts
• it agrees to some other firm evidence
• all is well in the accounting world

Auditors can demonstrate their creative side by using different coloured pens for different tick marks. The height of the auditors art is a multi-ticked and multi-coloured A3 Excel spreadsheet. However, the art is dying with the introduction of paper-less audit.

Before then, the debate rages between owners of single four-coloured pens and owners of four pens of different colour. The four-coloured pen is more useful, but it is more expensive and the auditor becomes impotent if it’s lost.

2) Second screen – Immensely useful. Second screens can be used to compare two documents, transfer information, or display different windows – like having email on one side and the internet on the other.

Unfortunately, carrying around a second screen on your back, in the tube on the way to a client is not practical. However, a second screen has other fringe benefits. Colleagues will wonder how you can use both eyes to focus on two separate screens (like a fighter pilot). It will make you appear 10% more intelligent and advanced.

3) Numpad – On average, an auditor will type out 1,456 numbers a day. Using the numbers at the top of the keyboard takes 0.4 seconds longer than using a numpad. That’s a potential saving of 9.7 minutes a day.

Auditors probably shouldn’t make up facts and numbers.

4) iPod – Music helps you audit, especially Taylor Swift.

5) Jedi powers – Fancy equipment makes not an auditor. It is his experience and knowledge that add the value. Good auditors work out where the adding error occurred without use of a calculator. They manipulate Excel spreadsheets by the keyboard alone. They instantly recall the most obscure of numbers from one page out of a thousand in a five year old audit file. They bring calm to the audit room. They are the Audit Jedi Masters.

Picture the scene: You are at a party and meet someone new. You ask for their name, which is pointless because you forget it instantly. You move onto the next question: “Where do you work?”. Fortunately for you, the person is not unemployed but does say that they are an auditor.

Suddenly, you have no intelligent follow up questions, and are struggling not to make a joke about calculators. You force yourself a polite smile and comment that it is a “nice” job. However, you actually end up communicating that you think the other person is as interesting as beige. Talking stops and you both separate and get on with the rest of your lives.

This is where you need “insider questions”. Every profession has its own vocabulary, key concepts and idiosyncrasies. Learning a few key questions will make you sound intelligent and have great conversation. However, use insider questions sparingly before you are discovered to be a fraud. Do move the conversation on to mutually interesting topics, such as the weather.

The insider questions for auditors

1) Busy season – Auditors will do a great deal of their work from January to April, often without holiday. This is because audits are conducted after the end of the financial year. This is 31 December for most companies. Mentioning these two words to an auditor will either get them talking enthusiastically or crying endlessly – be prepared.

2) Exams – This is a classic question. Every auditor has gone / is going through exam trauma. Myriad questions can be asked: Which institute?; How many exams they have passed so far?; How many exams left?; How many attempts before getting fired?; Which calculator they use in an exam?

Be sure to mention that you couldn’t work and study full time and that they are making the noblest of sacrifices.

3) Longest hours worked – Every auditor will have their personal story of the nightmare client with the 100 hour week in a tiny conference room that smelled a bit. These are the scars of audit and are worn as badges of honour. Do ask an auditor about their worst job.

4) Funny audit room moments – Cramped conference rooms, long hours, stress and green pens have a strange effect on the auditor’s brain.

5) Cool clients – Not all clients are widget manufacturers. There are interesting audit clients. Just think, for every chocolate factory and theme park there is an auditor having fun.

Pens – the key to audit. Photo taken by atomicShed

Questions to be avoided

Certain questions will annoy the auditor. Use these with care:

1) Jokes about counting beans – This instantly shows your ignorance of what auditors actually do. Bean counters are actually “mere” bookkeepers. Audit is more interesting than that. We check that the annual bean report is correct in terms of number, size, type and weight. And only the larger beans are checked, the small beans are ignored.

2) Asking for confidential information – This is illegal. However, if the auditor acquiesces to you “well-intentioned” joke then immediately phone the Metropolitan Police on 0300 123 1212. Make sure you take a photograph and then run to the nearest safe house until the danger has passed.  

3) Mentioning the tax year – There is merit in knowing that the personal tax year runs until 05 April. However, this date is irrelevant to auditors because they are only concerned with companies. If you try to work this date into a conversation the auditor will start a long and uninteresting ramble on the meaninglessness of 05 April.

4) Posing maths questions – Friends have yelled a series of numbers at me and expected rapid mental arithmetic/calculus. This is a no-win situation for the auditor. Either we’ll get it correct and it is nothing special or get it wrong and look incompetent. Reality is that these days, auditors rely calculators and Excel spreadsheets, even mental calculations are double-checked using a calculator. 

5) Why audit? – Auditing is not a traditional childhood aspiration. This question might expose a graduate’s lack of imagination in choosing a career or a personal desire for a stable income. However, numbers are the great desire for some, but would that be admitted in public?

Do insider questions work?

Insider questions are useful. Last week, I tested out some over dinner with 11 junior doctors and a dentist. I asked questions about the hours and interesting/dangerous patients. After a while, I did try to move the conversation beyond work by asking about non-work activities.

This is important to avoid being exposed as a fraud. But more importantly, no-one really wants to talk so much about work. It’s a Western cultural quirk that the second question we ask is: “where do you work?”. We define ourselves by our work but it is not where our passions lie.

Sadly, the reply to the question was: “I don’t have any spare time”.

The insider questions idea is taken from “How to Talk to Anyone” by Leil Lowndes.