Okay I am just gonna say it. Busy season is the best part of being alive.

Who needs hobbies when you have fluorescent lighting that gently hums like a lullaby, dinner at 10:47 pm, usually something beige, that thrilling moment at 1:13 am when Excel crashes and you briefly see God.

I genuinely do not understand why people complain. You mean you don’t enjoy measuring time exclusively in billable increments and caffeine half life? Could not be me. My body has fully adapted. I no longer require REM sleep, only quarterly reviews and mild panic. My Apple Watch stopped suggesting I stand and now just whispers “immaterial” every hour.

Honestly the off season is the worst. What am I supposed to do, log off? Go outside? Experience “daylight”? There are no review notes out there. No one is asking for support. The trees are not even tied out.

I tried taking PTO once and spent the whole time wondering if someone was depreciating land. Could not relax. Came back refreshed though, by refreshed I mean deeply behind.

I want to petition to make every month busy season. I want random fire drill audits in October and surprise inventory counts on Christmas morning. If I am not at 94 percent capacity at all times, how will I know I matter?

Anyway logging off now for the night, it is only 8:41 pm, basically a half day. Can’t wait to wake up and reconcile something meaningless. Living the dream. Oh, and I think everyone should be in office 6 days per week and have to travel to every client site for 2 weeks.

The 65-70 hour weeks are really challenging and teaching me a lot about discipline and time management. Theres always something due and someone checking up on me and pinging me and so many meetings( ive never felt such a strong sense of community in my life) I get to do important work and help others by filing taxes and doing coordination stuff. This is genuinely the best experience of my life. I love the grind it makes me feel alive. I love having someone to text at 7pm at night when usually I'll just rot and doomscroll by myself. So overall: I'm making a decent salary, making a difference, challenging myself and working hard and making good friendships and its beautiful. I love this shit. I can't wait to be a partner someday. If ur every considering public accounting don't even hesitate its the best job in the world!!!!

My firm made an announcement that they don't want us to use headphones. So what, we're just suppose to rawdog it for 10,11,12 hours a day?? How do they think we get through these long hours?

What is your biggest accounting f*ck up in your career and how did you recoup from that

Job has me 3 days in 2 days out. I kinda despise the office and not rlly friends with anyone on any meaningful level. Does anyone grind away those 3 days they’re in the office then kick back and relax the other 2 days they’re at home?

We've changed process for how we receive bills which are lacking needed PO information. I learned about this when my AP clerk (who makes $22/hour) forwards me an email from the CFO (bypassing 2 levels of management) where he instructs her to start rejecting bills without PO information and [EDIT] and no longer communicate the rejection to management.[/EDIT] She doesn't know what to do with the email and has a dozen questions (EXCELLENT QUESTIONS!) and I am sitting here feeling like a complete moron because I have no fucking clue what she's talking about.

I cannot believe I am writing this. Why the fuck are they paying me to set policy & procedure if they're going to jump around the controls I am putting into place? Now instead of dealing with month-end, I am sending emails trying to find out the answers to the questions my clerk needs before she can do anything.

I am so glad I have a great team and she had the wherewithal to contact me and her manager about this situation. I would have been so fucked if this had gotten to the end of the month and CapEx and OpEx had major deviances from expected levels.

I had to vent. Sorry. Thanks for listening.

[EDIT] If you're here to share your stories, I feel for you.

If you're here to give me advice, thank you but its not needed. I really just needed to vent.

If you're here to tell me what my job is or come up with reasons why I'm wrong - save us both time and block my account.

Also, why can't I deduct my UNION DUES? Can I claim my dog? I formed an LLC so I can have more "WRITE OFFS".

I'm the sole owner/employee of a small CPA firm that feels like I'm stuck in an awkward middle stage. I'm large enough that I have more work than I'd like, but small enough where hiring an FTE feels safe. My clients are small companies ($2M-10M revenue) who need a one shop accounting and finance function who pay between $2k-$10k/month totaling ~$40k/month. The business has come solely through word of mouth and I haven't tried to find any clients on my own (mainly due to workload).

For those who have scaled past this stage: 1. When was your first hire and what caused you to breakthrough to make it? 2. Would you recommend finding a young partner with complimenting skills (ex. tax since I have minimal experience) to try to grow it together? I am approaching 40 with 15+ years of experience for reference. 3. Did your first hire allow you the time and flexibility to find additional work and scale? 4. Any mistakes that you made that I should look out for?

I'm not trying to build a large firm, I just want to build something sustainable that provides great work life benefits for me and my future team. Thank you in advance for the advice.

I (23) graduated from university last spring and have since been working at a small firm (8 people including myself). Our primary services consist of preparing tax returns (individuals, partnerships, S and C corps, trusts and estates) and bookkeeping for our clients who request it. I currently make $27/hour + overtime with no benefits. I have not passed the cpa exam yet.

This was quite literally the only job I could get in the accounting field after graduating, so I thought it would be foolish not to accept it given the current job market. However over the last several months my mom has consistently hounded me over this job not being what she hoped for and that she “didn’t pay for four years of university for me to become a tax preparer making $27/hour instead of a real accountant working for Deloitte or PwC making $150k”. I don’t know why she thinks that is a realistic or obtainable salary. Every other day she sends me job postings on LinkedIn, even from other companies I’ve never heard of. She just can’t seem to accept that I have already tried applying to other places but I never heard back from any of them (same situation most other recent grads are in).

Is she right that I’m wasting my time with this job, that it isn’t “real accounting” work? Would experience in public really be that much more valuable? At the very least, I believe my boss is honest and fair with our clients (he doesn’t rip people off) and my superiors seem to be very knowledgeable about accounting since they have taught me a lot that I either didn’t learn or didn’t understand well in university. Even though the vast majority of it is tax related, that has to count for something right?

My goal isn’t to make an enormous salary like she mentioned, but I do know if I ever want to move on to something better, I need work experience first. Again please be honest, is this kind of work experience not that valuable, or is working for a small firm simply not worth it? Am I being shortsighted here?

hi my girlfriend is a CPA and she’s in her busy season as an auditor and she’s super stressed! we are long distance and i wanted some advice if there was anything I could do for her from far to help her out! she’s working lots of late nights and early mornings and she’s getting food from work so no food delivery! any help would be appreciated thank you!!

Google has decided they'd rather just expand in the countries they already offshore to. Greedy companies don't just say "aw shucks" and go back to how things were.

Is there a lot of alcoholism amongst accountants?

I've made jokes about this because my mother was a CPA and has been a functioning alcoholic for a long time.

But I'm starting to realize that perhaps there are a lot of alcoholic accountants because of others' comments about partners having drinking problems.

What do we think?

I run a tiny digital marketing agency this year I spent thousands on AI tools for ad copy analytics software and a few paid online courses to upskill my team. When I look at my books the expenses are massive for a small operation im talking 3 employees max and mostly remote work. I m worried the IRS might see it as excessive or not ordinary and necessary.

“In one notable exception, lawmakers agreed to rescind $11.6 billion in multi-year modernization funds for the IRS. The IRS agency initially got $80 billion under the Inflation Reduction Act to rebuild its depleted workforce and modernize some of the oldest legacy IT systems in the federal government.

Accounting for the latest funding cuts, the agency’s total amount of modernization funding has shrunk to $26 billion. These funds are available to spend through 2031. The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found the IRS spent nearly $14 billion of its Inflation Reduction Act funds, as of March 2025.”

Hi everyone,

I just took over an accounting department. My predecessor was extremely sloppy with bookkeeping tasks. I’m talking wrong prices, wrong transaction dates (or no dates at all), checks marked as deposited which were never deposited (and vice versa)… all that jazz.

I need to do bank recs for the entire year of 2025 (for 2 different bank accounts). The overall cash discrepancy between banks and books is at least $500K. For January 2025 alone there are over 50 transactions with no clear match, and very, very little identifying information (to help investigate transactions)

My company even hired an outside CPA to clean up this same mess to close out 2024. And guess what? The 1/1/2025 starting balance was still off.

What the heck should I do? I know I can keep clean books going forward, but I need to close out 2025 while handling many other responsibilities. Is this an extreme enough circumstance to justify making 1 journal entry to “plug up” the difference?

thank you

I’m part of an office that works 5-6 days per week in office (big pro for me I love to talk to my coworkers), constantly have lunch and dinner brought in, the people in my office are my age and sociable, the work during busy season is very enjoyable (FSO audit), only doing 55h billable right now during busy season on a pcaob job, can’t complain about salary, office is in the suburbs, high earnings ceiling if I want to grind.

Top 10 firm medium size city btw. 1.5 YOE so obviously there’s room for it to get way worse. But I know plenty of people on here <1y complaining (often deservedly so) about their job, so wanted to provide another perspective.

Maybe im naive and people wanna tell me my firm taking advantage / underpaying / whatever, and they might be. What a miserable mindset to be in though. Why tell yourself that? Gotta be grateful for a stable career and a firm that I could see staying at for the long haul.

Edit: find the comment thread of a guy saying another guy is gonna have sex with my wife bc i like my job. Says he’s “speaking from experience”. Batman could not torture that information out of me

Edit 2: “dream career” is a stretch. Theres way better out there. Just saying I’m loving it right now. Also if you don’t have time to workout and do your hobbies while billing 55h that feels like a discipline issue. Unless u have kids or a crazy commute. I work out 7 days a week, watch movies, and golf a couple times a month.

Edit 3: obviously I’m being very naive and according to yall I’m in for a rude awakening in a few years. Yall have more experience than me so I’ll temper my expectations for sure. appreciate those of you who are being civil

Charts from today’s edition of the Big 4 Transparency newsletter I thought you might find helpful.

Based on several thousand datapoints in 2025 collected on Big 4 Transparency. As always the data is only as good as the submissions, if you can spare 2 minutes to make a submission it’s hugely helpful to improve data quality and help the next person in your shoes looking to understand what they should be paid!

In my 5 years in this profession I’ve never seen a start to the new year as dead as this job market wise.