Accounting Careers

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Put simply – accountants are in charge of making sure all the money adds up. They keep records, balance accounts, perform audits, and assist individuals and businesses with preparing their taxes and making investments.

Careers in public accounting include numbers in some way, shape or form, so be ready to spent a lot of time looking at spreadsheets and doing mathematical calculations. Typically, there are four main types of accounting careers – public accounting, government accounting, internal auditing, and management accounting.

What is an Accountant

Careers in accounting always involve taxes, taxes and more taxes. If you decide to specialize in taxes, you’ll do a lot of work between January and April – the traditional tax time. However, you’ll also have some things to do off-season, especially if you also offer small business consultation. New companies always need advice on taxes, especially when it comes to collecting employment taxes like FICA and social security.

Public accountants may also help clients make solid investments or audit their client’s financial records to ensure that they are correct. If all this number crunching sounds a little dull, you might want to consider forensic accounting. This sub-field of practice involves investigating securities fraud, embezzlement, and other crimes involving finances. While you won't be chasing down crooks, setting up wiretaps or anything like that, it’s still a great career for anyone who enjoys solving puzzles and figuring out how things were accomplished.

In contrast with the traditional privacte sector tax accounting careers, working for the government as an accountant means maintaining agency financial records, auditing individuals or businesses, and preparing local, state, or even federal budgets. Working for local and state governments usually means ensuring that income and expenditures are made in accordance with the many laws that surround government spending. On the federal level, accountants can work for the IRS and may specialize in tax law, receiving and filing tax returns and even conducting tax audits.

Although the IRS may perform an audit of a company, businesses often audit themselves first to make sure there's no fraud or wasteful expenditures. Depending on the size of the business, these audits are generally handled by internal auditors. These auditors do more than just make sure all the numbers add up as they should – they also look at how a company manages its money by evaluating the company’s procedures and record-keeping system. Internal auditors may also evaluate the software a company uses to handle its financial records, so some familiarity with computer programs will be useful to accountants in this area.

Finally, management accountants are charged with recording and analyzing all the financial date for their company. They create company budgets, evaluate financial records, and work to create a fiscally responsible, strategic plan for the company. Management accountants often have a lot of input in the direction a company is taking and their advice may result in sweeping changes in both the company's organizational structure and the products it creates.

Generally, an accountant's duties and responsibilities demand that they spend their working hours in their offices, although some occasionally work at home or need to travel to another location to examine records. Typically, accountants don’t need to work over 40 hours a week, although those who focus on taxes will find themselves putting in a lot more time during tax season.

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