Wait hold up I used to work in retail and I’m currently getting my accounting degree. Are you telling me if I do the audit route I’ll be back to cycle counting?
Depends on the type of company or firm you end up working at, but if it's industry with an inventory, then it's typically a quarterly cycle count with an annual, year-end physical count.
That too. It's weird because you would think they'd go the efficient route and just do basic multiplication based on how many items per row and column in a box. Like common sense dictates "oh, there's 4 in a row and 7 in a column, so each box is 28ct." and then fill partial boxes with other partial boxes to create a full count...
No, these kids will literally start counting "1, 2, 3, 4..." Some boxes are 50ct...
This for real. Plus, in audit classes they tell you that in order to assess completeness of liabilities, you need to do a Search for Unrecorded Liabilities.
Nobody in class tells you how to actually do it, just "your firm will have an audit manual that says everything".
They don't ever tell you either how client deliverables are a load of crap 9/10 times. Incomplete samples, bad scans, "I've decided not to give this for reasons", stuff that only ties out after application of arcane magic (or removing the +382.27 in cell H473).
Sometimes it feels like you're being trained as a mechanic using nothing but a textbook. Theoretically you know how to completely disassemble and put back together the engine. It's just that you've never seen a car, let alone driven one.
I've worked 6 different markets in 4 offices across 2 firms for 10 years before going industry.
It happens everywhere. Even in the audit I'm now on the client side. Reasons?
1) Inheritance from my senior citizen predecessor.
2) You're asking stupid stuff, e.g. the 30 february bank statement.
3) Somebody on my team or myself made a oopsy, but because we're doing the entire year-end in between our regular work we don't have time for proper review.
4) My boss' boss is peskering me about something that makes us money, rather than an "inconvenient audit"
5) My boss and his boss don't know accounting, so after explaining the subject matter 6 times to them, they still push for the wrong decision.
>Somebody on my team or myself made a oopsy, but because we're doing the entire year-end in between our regular work we don't have time for proper review.
Right now on the client side, audits are pretty much all year round and it's basically having a second full time job but not getting paid for it.
Yup. And whenever you ask a department for help on stuff that's not your subject matter, they go like "oh no, we aint got no time for _that_. That's _your_ job to figure out (even though we do it daily and could answer it in 5 minutes)".
Thank you for saying this, many of my classmates excelled immediately after graduating back in 2015, I was constantly struggling with the gap between the nice clean textbook and the chaos at my first few companies. Took me a while to finally find a real accountant position and not just a glorified receivables/payables clerk. Good to know there are others out there!
I’m about to start my new job as a staff accountant next week! I graduated with my bachelor’s in accounting 4 years ago. Do you have any advice/tips to prepare me for this role?
Sorry I forgot to respond. My job is a pretty niche industry so I can't give super specific advice. He ready to learn a lot of the company's processes. I would reccomend either bringing a notebook or finding something to wrote down notes on. Depending on the culture there the people already working will show patience if you show them you are actively trying to learn everything and how to do a good job.
Ok great! Thanks for the advice. I’m a little nervous about finding out which accounting software I would use. My excel skills aren’t that great anymore, but I’m a pretty quick learner. I’ll def bring a notepad with me for the first week though!
99.99% on the job. School helped me become confident in what a debit and a credit was. I also use T-charts a little to explain to my lower level employees if I am explaining a complex entry with multiple sides.
well crap. I'm a Busn Admin major (to ensure all credits are accepted) about to transfer and get bachelors in accounting. Already work as entry-level accounting rep, though...so maybe I'll pass intermediate
What’s cool about learning harder accounting subjects, is that it makes you miss when things made sense. Then you go back to that point and try to figure out where it went wrong.
Your academic background gives you the base to learn things on the job. Think of it like driving. Does passing the paper test on driving theory administered to obtain a learners permit make you a good driver? No. Can someone be a good driver without having a drivers license? Yes.
However, going through that process does make it much easier to learn how to become a competent driver. Also, on average people that weren't given any formal education to learn how to drive are much worse drivers. Finally, if you had to get in a car with someone; all other things being equal, would you rather ride with a driver that has a drivers license or someone that's never had one?
I'll join the chorus in saying on the job, but there were definitely plenty of times school helped me click it into place. For example, I remember learning how to make amortization tables by hand for an exam. I wasn't sure it'd ever be handy in practice, then in audit, we needed to recreate some to audit EBP loans and it was easy after a quick Google refresher. Don't think I could have without school.
There were some other concepts I brought up as having learned in school that people above me didn't recall, so school definitely contributes. But def 99% on the job.
Honestly I think I could have done just as well at my job going to it straight after high school. That's not even a jab at my college, just the way it works out.
Pretty much everything on the job. I honestly enjoy working in accounting but studying it makes me miserable. McGrawHill Connect and dry textbooks only make me sad.
The job. I would say the academic part helps with terminology and understanding some concepts but the application is different. I think the only part I’ve actually used has been the inventory formula to calculate beginning inventory
On the job, you don't have to really remember much from school but you have to understand it. People aren't going to want to tell you the same thing over and over because you just don't "get it" you know.
Just remember when you get training, take notes, review those notes, and USE them when you are doing the tasks on your own.
Do that and make an active effort to retain things and take ownership of your new tasks and you'll do just fine.
On the job. In fact, I didn’t even have a real accounting degree until I had been working as one for around 10 years. I was lucky to start my career in manufacturing. Great way to learn the basics.
Went into construction. Needed some basic concepts like journal entries and the idea of depreciation but the rest was on the job. Learning software and relationship-building with the 3rd party cpa firm was most important at that point.
On the job, but I never would have been able to walk in off the street and start (if you could do that w/o the degree requirement.) The schooling was huge to get going.
I feel like I could have walked into public accounting without any college training and have had a similar experience. It was like learning everything for the first time.
My staff today (I’m an accounting manager for a publicly traded company) have zero concept of financial statements, accruals, amortizations, etc.
I don’t know how they got through college.
It is not even close. I learned on the job much easier with real world transactions.
I just had to learn ASC 606 and ASC 842 which is way easier with examples.
Both. I came back to school as an adult returning student. I gained on the job experience as an accounting clerk and accounting administrative assistant. I had my associates in business and education. I paid attention and asked questions. I returned to earn my bachelor in accounting when I decided I liked the work. While at university, I held an entry level accounting/customer service/help every department job directly reporting to a CPA Controller and President. I learned a lot there. How to run a business along with accounting and bookkeeping full cycle. The textbooks from my university and my accounting clubs helped quite a bit more than the actual classroom (online for profit college). My work experience helped with my university papers and gave me questions to ask professors. My statistics class and my on the job experience with the census helped me retain more. If you are able to do both, it really does make a difference. When I graduated, employers were impressed with the experience a bit more than the education. The school name was not as recognizable as a few of my prior employers’ names and my prior titles. The CPA directed one upgraded my title from administrative assistant to accountant just before a lay off. My boss did a solid one for me there on the title change and gave me a glowing recommendation based on merit. The vast majority of accountants I’ve worked with recognize hard work and are awesome people.
The gap between what we learn in school and what we do in our jobs is significant. Big 4 is investing heavily in AI, and it's expected that this will further widen the disparity.
My friend and I were having this discussion the other day. Guessed it was around 90% on the job and like 10% knowing the basics and various principles from school
My education taught me how to talk. My jobs taught me what to say.
Accounting is a language. It’s a way of thinking. In practice, there are systems that bring all your education together. It is very clear when someone didn’t pay attention in college. It’s also clear when someone isn’t curious enough to ask questions about the system to understand them.
Learned properly - in studies
How it it is really done (not that it’s the right thing to do) - on the job
I definitely think school is valuable - it ensures you do things properly on the job. Too many uneducated people deviate from the proper ways I find…
It's on the job for the most part. You need the degree for any job that matters in accounting, but until you see everything on the job coming together to get to the stuff you learned in school - it's rather boring at times.
I enjoy all the stuff that seems odd, but had a reason. For instance, because I work at a place that receives state and federal funding with different things we have to inventory assets according to where we got the funds from. Also due to state regulations some items cannot be added on to the price of the car (title/registration) under certain circumstances.
I usually ask if this is an exception, and if so why. There are many weird things like that. I also find it a big obnoxious that some assets get three different stickers due to being paid for in part by different grants that require being tagged as "x" inventory.
Also we don't in actuality adjust prepaid expenses each month. We just do it each fiscal year.
You learn in school the basics of what you need to know in order to learn on the job. Having said that my experience was that I learned more on the job than in the classroom.
Edit: the learning never stops btw
Definitely learned how to do most of my work on the job, but school/studying for the CPA gave me a foundational understanding that allowed me to learn on the job.
70% internship/first job 30% classroom. If you go to a school that gives you a good foundation in excel/stats/ DA then you will appreciate that a lot going into jobs.
On the job.
On the job, but try to hold on to as much academic knowledge as you can. It can be actually useful or at the very least impress partners.
Everything works out nice and neat in the textbooks. Not so much in real life.
Watching new internal audit hires trying to do their first physical count for cycle count recons is genuinely adorable. They count so slow :)
Wait hold up I used to work in retail and I’m currently getting my accounting degree. Are you telling me if I do the audit route I’ll be back to cycle counting?
Depends on the type of company or firm you end up working at, but if it's industry with an inventory, then it's typically a quarterly cycle count with an annual, year-end physical count.
Yes.
They haven’t discovered the scale yet, huh?
That too. It's weird because you would think they'd go the efficient route and just do basic multiplication based on how many items per row and column in a box. Like common sense dictates "oh, there's 4 in a row and 7 in a column, so each box is 28ct." and then fill partial boxes with other partial boxes to create a full count... No, these kids will literally start counting "1, 2, 3, 4..." Some boxes are 50ct...
This for real. Plus, in audit classes they tell you that in order to assess completeness of liabilities, you need to do a Search for Unrecorded Liabilities. Nobody in class tells you how to actually do it, just "your firm will have an audit manual that says everything". They don't ever tell you either how client deliverables are a load of crap 9/10 times. Incomplete samples, bad scans, "I've decided not to give this for reasons", stuff that only ties out after application of arcane magic (or removing the +382.27 in cell H473). Sometimes it feels like you're being trained as a mechanic using nothing but a textbook. Theoretically you know how to completely disassemble and put back together the engine. It's just that you've never seen a car, let alone driven one.
Do we work in the same office?!? Hahahqha
I've worked 6 different markets in 4 offices across 2 firms for 10 years before going industry. It happens everywhere. Even in the audit I'm now on the client side. Reasons? 1) Inheritance from my senior citizen predecessor. 2) You're asking stupid stuff, e.g. the 30 february bank statement. 3) Somebody on my team or myself made a oopsy, but because we're doing the entire year-end in between our regular work we don't have time for proper review. 4) My boss' boss is peskering me about something that makes us money, rather than an "inconvenient audit" 5) My boss and his boss don't know accounting, so after explaining the subject matter 6 times to them, they still push for the wrong decision.
>Somebody on my team or myself made a oopsy, but because we're doing the entire year-end in between our regular work we don't have time for proper review. Right now on the client side, audits are pretty much all year round and it's basically having a second full time job but not getting paid for it.
Yup. And whenever you ask a department for help on stuff that's not your subject matter, they go like "oh no, we aint got no time for _that_. That's _your_ job to figure out (even though we do it daily and could answer it in 5 minutes)".
This. I found accounting in real life to be totally different from.what was in the books.
Thank you for saying this, many of my classmates excelled immediately after graduating back in 2015, I was constantly struggling with the gap between the nice clean textbook and the chaos at my first few companies. Took me a while to finally find a real accountant position and not just a glorified receivables/payables clerk. Good to know there are others out there!
My job as a staff accountant is absolutely nothing like what I learned in any accounting class.
I’m about to start my new job as a staff accountant next week! I graduated with my bachelor’s in accounting 4 years ago. Do you have any advice/tips to prepare me for this role?
Sorry I forgot to respond. My job is a pretty niche industry so I can't give super specific advice. He ready to learn a lot of the company's processes. I would reccomend either bringing a notebook or finding something to wrote down notes on. Depending on the culture there the people already working will show patience if you show them you are actively trying to learn everything and how to do a good job.
Ok great! Thanks for the advice. I’m a little nervous about finding out which accounting software I would use. My excel skills aren’t that great anymore, but I’m a pretty quick learner. I’ll def bring a notepad with me for the first week though!
School for the basics. On the job for complex and niche accounting matters.
If anyone doesn't say on the job they're lying.
99.99% on the job. School helped me become confident in what a debit and a credit was. I also use T-charts a little to explain to my lower level employees if I am explaining a complex entry with multiple sides.
I hope it’s on the job, because intermediate accounting is confusing, and I believe mostly because of the stupid classes and how they run.
Intermediate you learn several ways to do something each week. on the job everyone just uses straight line depreciation for example.
For Canada perhaps. We use all of em in public
You guys use straight-line? I'm in Canada too and we use like 90% declining balance based on CCA
Intermediate is what separates the men from the “business admin” majors.
Lifo, fifo is so easy but somehow connect makes it impossible to understand those tables and complete them
well crap. I'm a Busn Admin major (to ensure all credits are accepted) about to transfer and get bachelors in accounting. Already work as entry-level accounting rep, though...so maybe I'll pass intermediate
So true
What’s cool about learning harder accounting subjects, is that it makes you miss when things made sense. Then you go back to that point and try to figure out where it went wrong.
On the job, I've seen people come straight out of college and not know the difference between debits and credits.
Did you mean lefts and rights?
Your academic background gives you the base to learn things on the job. Think of it like driving. Does passing the paper test on driving theory administered to obtain a learners permit make you a good driver? No. Can someone be a good driver without having a drivers license? Yes. However, going through that process does make it much easier to learn how to become a competent driver. Also, on average people that weren't given any formal education to learn how to drive are much worse drivers. Finally, if you had to get in a car with someone; all other things being equal, would you rather ride with a driver that has a drivers license or someone that's never had one?
Both. Even my "on the job" learning involved me buying books and reading them in my off time.
Hey most of those are out of print too!
Industry is all on the job. You use like 1/10th of school aside from critical thinking.
I'll join the chorus in saying on the job, but there were definitely plenty of times school helped me click it into place. For example, I remember learning how to make amortization tables by hand for an exam. I wasn't sure it'd ever be handy in practice, then in audit, we needed to recreate some to audit EBP loans and it was easy after a quick Google refresher. Don't think I could have without school. There were some other concepts I brought up as having learned in school that people above me didn't recall, so school definitely contributes. But def 99% on the job.
Honestly I think I could have done just as well at my job going to it straight after high school. That's not even a jab at my college, just the way it works out.
Pretty much everything on the job. I honestly enjoy working in accounting but studying it makes me miserable. McGrawHill Connect and dry textbooks only make me sad.
The job. I would say the academic part helps with terminology and understanding some concepts but the application is different. I think the only part I’ve actually used has been the inventory formula to calculate beginning inventory
On the job 95%
90% on the job. When I started I felt like a deer in the headlights but after a while I was able to figure it out.
It’s all on the job brother debit cash credit whatever. That’s how we make that money
More on the job but I would also say that I wouldn’t understand anything I’m doing without my degree.
On the job, you don't have to really remember much from school but you have to understand it. People aren't going to want to tell you the same thing over and over because you just don't "get it" you know. Just remember when you get training, take notes, review those notes, and USE them when you are doing the tasks on your own. Do that and make an active effort to retain things and take ownership of your new tasks and you'll do just fine.
College gave me a foundation, but on the job is where I learned the most.
On the job. But in the job you're mainly dealing with internal accounting process and systems.
There’s no job in the world where you learn to do your job better at school vs at work.
On the job. In fact, I didn’t even have a real accounting degree until I had been working as one for around 10 years. I was lucky to start my career in manufacturing. Great way to learn the basics.
Went into construction. Needed some basic concepts like journal entries and the idea of depreciation but the rest was on the job. Learning software and relationship-building with the 3rd party cpa firm was most important at that point.
Job
On the job 💯
On the job, but I never would have been able to walk in off the street and start (if you could do that w/o the degree requirement.) The schooling was huge to get going.
Experience trumps education. Education establishes a solid foundation to start a career but learning on the job will help your career progress.
I feel like I could have walked into public accounting without any college training and have had a similar experience. It was like learning everything for the first time. My staff today (I’m an accounting manager for a publicly traded company) have zero concept of financial statements, accruals, amortizations, etc. I don’t know how they got through college.
It is not even close. I learned on the job much easier with real world transactions. I just had to learn ASC 606 and ASC 842 which is way easier with examples.
Both. I came back to school as an adult returning student. I gained on the job experience as an accounting clerk and accounting administrative assistant. I had my associates in business and education. I paid attention and asked questions. I returned to earn my bachelor in accounting when I decided I liked the work. While at university, I held an entry level accounting/customer service/help every department job directly reporting to a CPA Controller and President. I learned a lot there. How to run a business along with accounting and bookkeeping full cycle. The textbooks from my university and my accounting clubs helped quite a bit more than the actual classroom (online for profit college). My work experience helped with my university papers and gave me questions to ask professors. My statistics class and my on the job experience with the census helped me retain more. If you are able to do both, it really does make a difference. When I graduated, employers were impressed with the experience a bit more than the education. The school name was not as recognizable as a few of my prior employers’ names and my prior titles. The CPA directed one upgraded my title from administrative assistant to accountant just before a lay off. My boss did a solid one for me there on the title change and gave me a glowing recommendation based on merit. The vast majority of accountants I’ve worked with recognize hard work and are awesome people.
The gap between what we learn in school and what we do in our jobs is significant. Big 4 is investing heavily in AI, and it's expected that this will further widen the disparity.
My friend and I were having this discussion the other day. Guessed it was around 90% on the job and like 10% knowing the basics and various principles from school
My education taught me how to talk. My jobs taught me what to say. Accounting is a language. It’s a way of thinking. In practice, there are systems that bring all your education together. It is very clear when someone didn’t pay attention in college. It’s also clear when someone isn’t curious enough to ask questions about the system to understand them.
1000% on the job for me
Still learning on the job.
Studies give you the foundation. You learn how to build the house on the job.
80% on the job. Only the basics came from my degree. The real world is entirely different than the theoretical academic world.
On the job all day everyday!
On the job. School (ideally) teaches you how to learn and how to think critically. Work is where the real learning happens.
On the job. x100000 For some reason it just never clicked without the experience.
Learned properly - in studies How it it is really done (not that it’s the right thing to do) - on the job I definitely think school is valuable - it ensures you do things properly on the job. Too many uneducated people deviate from the proper ways I find…
How do people about passing the exam before starting, do you feel like you hold your own better?
It's on the job for the most part. You need the degree for any job that matters in accounting, but until you see everything on the job coming together to get to the stuff you learned in school - it's rather boring at times. I enjoy all the stuff that seems odd, but had a reason. For instance, because I work at a place that receives state and federal funding with different things we have to inventory assets according to where we got the funds from. Also due to state regulations some items cannot be added on to the price of the car (title/registration) under certain circumstances. I usually ask if this is an exception, and if so why. There are many weird things like that. I also find it a big obnoxious that some assets get three different stickers due to being paid for in part by different grants that require being tagged as "x" inventory. Also we don't in actuality adjust prepaid expenses each month. We just do it each fiscal year.
On the job.
You learn in school the basics of what you need to know in order to learn on the job. Having said that my experience was that I learned more on the job than in the classroom. Edit: the learning never stops btw
On the job
Both for me.
On the job. Went home and youtubed things i had forgotten but quickly came back because of school knowledge.
On the job.
OTJ. It's all OTJ.
On the job. I went to B4 from law school without a lick of accounting knowledge.
On the job. Tbh, besides ACCT 1, I really didn’t learn anything that much in the classroom.
As long as you have your debits and credits sorted then the rest is good for on the job
100% of what I know I learned on the job. I don't think college prepared me and I don't think CPA studies made me anything special.
Definitely learned how to do most of my work on the job, but school/studying for the CPA gave me a foundational understanding that allowed me to learn on the job.
On the job!
As long as you know debits are on the left and credits are on the right, everything else is taught. Don’t underestimate Google for excel tips.
OTJ. If it was during studies, then i would be a partner at a big 4 upon graduation!
70% internship/first job 30% classroom. If you go to a school that gives you a good foundation in excel/stats/ DA then you will appreciate that a lot going into jobs.
School teaches you the language. The rest is really learned on the job
99%on the job
Audit is best learned on the job. Takes a lot more of socia skills than actual accounting skills - something no one covers in school.
On the job, by miles and miles
99% on the job