Have Your Accounting Cake and Eat it Too

I will now attempt a post that is not about sports or politics.

Two years ago today I interviewed with two public accounting firms in the Denver area. I bought a plane ticket and flew to Colorado to seek employment after failing to get hired anywhere in North Carolina. The first interview was the one that originally led me to try my luck in Colorado - one of the owners and another guy that I corresponded with were LDS. So it seemed like a good connection. But I didn't end up working for them. Although I did see the owner of that firm in the temple a year later - he asked me to do a family file name for him - but I'm not sure if he remembered me at all.

I went to the second interview later that afternoon and talked to both owners for about an hour and a half. It really didn't go that much different than any other interview I'd ever had - but I remember being impressed by the owners. They were so unpretentious - which is not a common thing when seeking a job in public accounting. I thought I would enjoy working for the firm. They called a few days later and offered me a job.

When I was in the early stages of job-seeking, I had lots of opportunities to talk to professionals. Usually one of the first questions they would ask was, "Audit or tax?" I think that my answers varied - but what I was really thinking can be summed up by the teenaged kid who gave Geena Davis a ride to the Suds Bucket in the movie A League of Their Own - "Can't we do both?"

Almost all firms make you choose one path or the other. They always claim you can switch later, but who knows how easy that is in reality. However, I do both audit and tax at my job, as do all my co-workers. I can't imagine having it any other way. The variety is great because sometimes you get tired of auditing and vice versa. I'm so glad I wound up not being forced to pick one. Otherwise I probably would have already dropped out of public accounting.

If you told the recruiters you weren't sure which one you wanted to pick, they always brought up that the main difference was that tax accountants worked out of the office while auditors spent most of their time at client locations. So, if you liked having your "own space" you should probably choose tax. Which is kind of stupid advice. I figured I should probably choose tax since I'm an introvert and kind of a homebody.

But that would have been a mistake. If I had to be in my office eight hours a day, five days a week, every week. . . I probably would have dropped out of public accounting, unless I had already jumped out the window to my untimely death first. I love having my own office - but after three or four weeks solid in the office, it gets really old. But then it's time to go on an audit, which is a great change of scenery. And then after a couple of weeks on the road, it's great to go back to your own office for a few days. Again, I'm glad it's not one or the other.

Travel is pretty limited. Almost all of our clients are located between Colorado Springs and Fort Collins, with a few more in the mountains. I go on exactly one overnight trip per year, to Avon, which is all of two nights in February. Sometimes I think it would be fun to get out and see more of the country. But then I think of what a hassle air travel is.

I found the right situation for me and succeeded - which was no surprise to me - I knew I was smart enough to do the work. I just didn't have the chops to get a job at a Big Four firm. Which is fine with me - it's just kind of a rite of passage for accountants to start out at Deloitte or one of those. I'm fine with skipping that rite. If I had wound up at a pretentious firm where the partners wear blue shirts with white collars I probably would have already dropped out of public accounting, if not fired for punching one of those Big 4 snobs. Lucky for me I'm not much of a butt-kisser.