A Day in the Life of an Accountant

Hi, I'm Ekta. This is a day in the life of an accountant. The role of a tax accountant is really two things. One is for tax preparation and two is for tax planning. An overall picture of my role is that I prepare tax returns. I also advise my clients from a tax perspective, whether they're undertaking some kind of business transaction or sales of stocks, typically from January to April 15th, as you know is the famous tax deadline. During that time I probably work closer to 60 hours a week. I work at a small firm. It's actually our family practice. It's really nice. It's like a very homey feel. I think there's a lot more job satisfaction. For me personally, working with small businesses and individuals, the advice I give has a real impact on their day-to-day life. I have the same morning routine every day. I start by checking my emails, making a to-do list, making myself a fresh cup of coffee, and then get started. The first thing I do is open up Outlook, check my emails, and then I'll also open up Canopy, which is our client CRM software. I work in Canopy almost every day. It's a great way for me to connect to my clients, see what they've uploaded, what to-dos I have, and what to-dos they have. I can kind of keep track of everything that way. You've caught me on an out-of-tax-season day where things are much slower. I don't have as much pressure to get things out to clients as quickly. There are a few important skills to be successful in this line of work. I definitely think being organized is the top one. You're dealing with a lot of their sensitive data, their personal data, and you want them to feel comfortable sharing with you so you can help them in the best way possible. The first thing I want to knock off my to-do list today is calling our tax software support line. One of my clients did a like-kind exchange where he exchanged one property for eight different properties. I've done one-for-one, so I know how to do that in the software. This is a little bit different, so I'm just gonna call them and hopefully they can help me out. I have a 1040 client that did a like-kind exchange, but they exchanged one property for eight different properties. I wasn't sure exactly how to enter that. We can do the like-kind exchange one-for-one. After we did that, we can select the new asset in there, go to edit, divide, and then we can divide it by the age. When I click into it, though, it's all grayed out. I can't actually adjust the cost basis. Let me look into this some more. Let me see what we can do. Hopefully I can get back to you tomorrow, if not later today. Okay, no problem. Thank you so much. So that's not actually uncommon for them to not be able to solve my issue on the first go. I mean, I do use the software pretty often, so I am pretty familiar with the ins and outs. I do only call them if it's really something I can't figure out. The softwares that I tend to work with the most for tax preparation, we use UltraTax, and then for bookkeeping we use QuickBooks. We also use that to process payroll for our clients. Again, like I mentioned earlier, we use Canopy for our CRM software, so those would be probably the top three softwares that we're working in a lot. Sometimes I just like to step out during lunch, get some fresh air, especially in the summer when it's nice out because I'm literally in front of a computer all day. I'll just grab a bite from, like, the sub shop across the street and then head to a park and just hang out there for, like, an hour or so. I didn't always want to be an accountant. Actually, my dad's an accountant. He started our firm 30 years ago, so I kind of grew up in the business, and if anyone asked me when I was younger what I wanted to be, I would say, I'm not sure, but definitely not an accountant. And then I found I kind of really liked my classes, and I was actually pretty good at it, so I decided to pursue it further and ended up in tax, specifically in accounting. My undergrad studies gave me a baseline knowledge of what I needed. I think my master's degree, everything I learned, I can directly apply to what I do on a day-to-day basis, so I'm finding that very valuable. Next, I'm going to call Taylor, who is an event planner. She reached out because she needed some tax help, so let's see what I can help her with. Hello? Hi, is this Taylor? Yes. Hi, Taylor, this is Ekta. I'm calling from CPA for Tax. I understand you're in the wedding event planning business? Yeah, so I started my company a little while ago, and it was kind of slow starting out, but it's kind of picked up now. So before the next tax season, I just want to get everything in order. That's why I wanted to speak with you today. That's great. I'm really glad to hear that. The best thing you can do is kind of like set yourself up for success. Let me just ask you a couple questions to get some background. Do you have an entity set up of any kind? Yes, I have an LLC set up. Okay, an LLC in New Jersey? Yes, in New Jersey. All right, got it. Do you file a separate business tax return, or do you file everything under your personal return? I file everything under my personal return. Okay, so I think you have a Schedule C, but when you get a chance, if you could send me your last year's returns, I can take a look. That'd be great. I will definitely send that to you. And then in terms of your bookkeeping, how do you kind of manage like your income and your expenses and all of that? So recently, I've just been doing everything through Excel. Okay, have you made any estimated tax payments this year? No, but I definitely want to get ahead of that. I can help you calculate what a good payment is, one, based off your last year's return, and two, based on what your income and like expenses you're expecting for this year. Okay, yeah, I could send everything to you in an email. All right, I think I have a pretty good idea of, you know, kind of where you're at. So let me put together a proposal for you, and I'll send it over, and then hopefully we can go from there. Okay, awesome. Thank you so much. You have a great day. You too. So SHIP's actually pretty advanced compared to a lot of the new business clients that I talk to, especially those that are just starting out. I'm hopeful we can, you know, get her really set up for the next few years, hopefully, in her business. So accounting is a pretty broad field. I would say I'm a generalist, so I do individual taxes, I do business taxes, I do payroll taxes. What I do actually translates to dollars and cents in their lives. If we can help them save in taxes, it could really make a difference in their lives. Another thing on my to-do list today was to review the financial statements of one of my clients who we will hopefully soon file their tax return. This particular client we do the bookkeeping for, so my employee would have already entered all the data, and now it's time for me to review it. The financial statements printed here on a comparative basis, and then just see if there's anything that kind of jumps out at me, anything I should maybe discuss with the client. Something challenging that I think most accountant face is honestly burnout. It is a very demanding job. As I said, it's seasonally extremely busy with the strict deadlines that are set by the federal government and state governments. I think the beauty of it though is that we're recognizing that and it's becoming more flexible. My long-term goal in accounting is to hopefully grow this firm. I would like a firm where people feel like they have the flexibility to be a successful accountant or successful CPA and have job satisfaction, but also not have to give up too much of their work-life balance, which is extremely important. So the last thing I like to do before I leave the office for the day is just to get an hour or two of studying in. I'd have to do 40 credits a year to maintain my license, or 120 credits every three years, but honestly it's so helpful because there's so many law changes, it's really necessary to do all of that learning. So I think I'm about all set for the day. I'm just going to wrap this up, make sure there's nothing I need to attend to email wise, and pretty much call it after that. This is my husband Dhruv, he's a financial advisor, so when we come home we can kind of debrief on our day and take a step back and see how it went for both of us. If someone's interested in my line of work and maybe they're right out of college, I would recommend getting a lot of different internships and, you know, private accounting, public accounting, and seeing what really is the best fit for you because there's lots of different ways you can do accounting and it's all very different, so you might love one type of accounting but hate another. Thanks for watching! Be sure to give us a like and subscribe to Indeed's channel. We'll see you next time!