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Dumbass Review Notes
The Roots of All Evil
Miscellaneous
Heresy
Dumbass Review Notes
In most public accounting firms, partners
do not prepare tax returns. Some variant of the following process
takes place:
The partner receives the information from
the client and assigns the tax return preparation to a manager, who
gives it to a senior, who gives it to a staff person, who prepares the
tax return, gives it back to the senior, the senior writes corrections
(review notes), gives it back to the staff, the staff person makes the
corrections (clears the review notes), gives the return back to the
senior who clears the cleared review notes and gives the return to the
manager who writes more review notes, hands the return back to the
senior who reviews the review notes and gives the return back to the
staff, the staff clears the second round of review notes, gives the
return back to the senior who again clears the cleared review notes and
gives the return back to the manager who also clears the cleared review
notes, or writes more and starts the process over, and then gives the
return to the partner who writes more review notes, back to the manager,
back to the senior, back to the staff and then back up again, and then
if all goes well the return is assembled, the partner signs the return,
and the return goes out the door.
Of course I'm leaving out the part during
this process where the staff person comes up with open items (stuff
we're missing from the client) while preparing the tax return, forwards
the open items list to the senior who writes down the same open items
while reviewing the return, forwards the return to the manager who
writes down the same open items again and then asks the staff person who
originally wrote the open items what the answers are. Eventually the client is sent the open items, which it later turns out were the wrong
questions and the client didn't answer half of them anyway because they
had more important things to do than answer annoying e-mails from
their accountants, so the open items process starts over again with new
questions and follow-up questions to the wrong questions that were asked
in the first place, but I digress.
A by-product of this wonderfully efficient
process is the review note. Sometimes review notes are effective-
they catch mistakes in the tax return and help people learn how to
avoid those mistakes in the future. Other times review notes can
be, well, less than effective. And in some cases, the review notes
are just plain stupid, in which case they qualify as "dumbass review
notes".
The following are actual review notes
written by real people, who shall remain anonymous, at CPA firms across
the country. Each excerpt below contains 1) The actual review note
written, and 2) The
smartass (unwritten) response the review note deserved.
Feel free to
e-mail me if you've
received a similar gem and I'll add it to the collection. To protect the guilty, no names,
accounting firms, or office locations will ever be disclosed on this
site. Enjoy:
Why is advertising
expense higher than last year?
I'll have to research
and get back to you, but my guess is that the client spent more money on
advertising this year, therefore the expense is higher.
What is rental income of $19,322?
Uh, income from rents?
Rent
expense looks low.
And my favorite color
is blue. What's your point?
Accounting fees seem high.
Maybe we should lower
our fees.
Why are we doing this
schedule different than last year?
Because last year's
schedule was wrong and caused the client
to pay a lot more tax than they should have.
Please change the
description to match the prior year. You should always follow what
was done in the prior
year.
I am the Prior Year,
your God, who gave you workpapers to follow. Thou shalt have no
other gods before me. Remember the Prior Year and keep it holy.
Honor thy Prior Year workpapers. Thou shalt not think. Thou shalt
not be creative. Thou shalt not commit deviations from the Prior
Year in any way. Thou shalt not covet a more efficient way of
doing things.
Change "office expense" to "office
overhead expense".
I'm glad the client is
paying you $350 per hour to catch these things.
Change "auto
expense" to "vehicle expense".
Thanks, another
audit red flag avoided.
Sorry to do this to
you, but at this late date and due to my lame computer skills, I need a
hard copy of everything in a file.
Review note requesting
that the entire, completed paperless project be printed out, stapled,
and re-referenced on paper. Written a month after the firm had
announced that future projects
should be prepared paperless where feasible.
Adjust payroll
tax expense by $.01
Somebody needs to get
laid more often.
Please alphabetize the list of other deductions on the supporting
statement for line 20.
Would you like fries
with your obsessive compulsive
disorder?
The client's name, the tax year, and the
name of the workpaper should be written at the top of each workpaper.
Sounds to me like
you're afraid that your knowledge of the tax law isn't strong enough
to write any points that might actually affect the numbers on the tax
return or save the client money, so instead you focus on workpaper technicalities.
PBC should always be written at the top right of
each client prepared workpaper instead of the top left.
Thanks for the safety
tip.
Check yes on the $3 presidential election campaign
box.
Because
what this country really needs is more political ads.
Is depreciation expense
correct? How was depreciation determined in the prior
year?
We drew
numbers out of a hat. Look at the depreciation
schedule.
I'm not sure I'm
comfortable with this number.
Have you
considered counseling? I know a good therapist who specializes in
this area.
Change the description for "political contributions" to
"nondeductible
political contributions".
As
opposed to the deductible kind?
(Internal Revenue Code Section 162(e)(1)(B) disallows political campaign
contributions as a tax deduction).
I don’t see any
interest being accrued on this note payable in the G/L.
The client is on the
cash basis.
Please sign off on the work docket under preparation and review.
Note written to a tax
staff member who neither prepared nor reviewed the tax return.
You didn't clear review points #4, 12 and
17.
I wasn't planning to
dignify them with a response.
Did we account for the
Federal/California differences on the California K-1?
No, the
numbers in the column on the K-1 titled "California
adjustments" are just my lotto picks for this week.
(Here's your sign).
What is the status of the Washington
property?
It hasn't moved. Next question.
Why do they have a new account for GL
#1395?
Just to
piss you off.
Did you actually review the checklist?
Does anyone?
Can I get an update on when you think the
following (6) tax returns will be done?
How about never? Does never work for you?
Why did the tax return go over budget?
Because I was busy
answering e-mails from you inquiring about the status of the
tax return and why it was
taking so long.
Please do the same
schedule as last year reconciling the client’s June 30th fiscal
year investment in partnership balance sheet numbers to the calendar
year K-1 ending balances using the client's distribution numbers from
January 1st through June 30th.
Let me make sure I
understand. You don't trust the client's numbers, so you are going
to use the client's numbers (distributions) to reconcile to the client's
numbers (investment in partnership)?
Need to request detail for cash balances.
We could do that, but I
think the auditors already beat that issue up pretty well when they did
the work for this here signed, audited financial statement.
(Client's assistant)
needs the tax return tonight to get (client's) signature
at their home tonight before he goes on vacation. When will the
return be ready for processing? [Sent via email]
[Auto-Reply] I am
currently on vacation and do not have access to e-mail. I will be
back in the office Monday and will return all e-mails at that time. The beginning
partner capital on the (2003) trial balance does not appear to include
the income from 2003.
No kidding, is that
why they call it "beginning" partner capital?
Add copies of all [300
pages of] supporting detail provided by client to the file
and reference each schedule to the trial balance.
And you
wonder why your projects go over budget.
Please make a note to pick
this item up for next year.
In the time
it took you to write the note asking me to write a note,
couldn't you have just written the note yourself?
There are some workpapers in
the extension area of the file that should be in the
carryforward area of the file.
Then why
don't you move them?
Please remember to
rubber band client files together.
Why, do you get a
commission from the manufacturer the more rubber bands we
use?
Make a note on
the assignment docket to attach a copy of the extension to the tax return.
“You can file
your tax return any time before the extension expires. Do not attach a
copy of Form 4868 to your return.” (IRS instructions for Form 4868,
Request for extension of time to file individual tax return).
Did you review the perm
file?
Of course, with
the miniscule budget you gave me to prepare the tax return I examined
every line of all 587 pages of irrelevant crap that has accumulated in
that file over the past 15 years.
Enter each individual
equipment addition per the client g/l and the date acquired on the
depreciation schedule rather than combining them into subgroups.
Cool, that way
when the tax software doesn’t roll forward the accumulated depreciation
correctly to next year we can go back and spend 10 hours manually
re-entering and overriding the federal, state, AMT, and state AMT
depreciation data for 147 individual assets rather than 6.
List on the assignment
docket each date you worked on the tax return and the number of hours
you spent each day.
....
And the
percentage of each day’s hours wasted clearing pointless review notes.
Need to do a
payroll reconciliation and adjust payroll expense on the tax return
to match the payroll tax returns and the W-3.
Payroll tax returns are prepared on the cash basis. The
client is on the accrual basis. Accrual basis means the client has
accrued salaries and vacation which show up in current year payroll
expense on an accrual basis tax return but which haven't been paid yet
and therefore do not show up on the payroll tax returns until next year.
Additionally, the client has book-tax differences, both this year and
last year, for accrued wages not paid within 2.5 months of year-end.
In other words, the payroll tax returns and the income tax returns
shouldn't match each other, so adjusting the payroll expense on the tax
return would result in the tax return going out the door wrong.
Accrue rent expense of $600 for December and record rent income
for the same amount on [related entity's] books. Also reverse the rent
accrual we did from last year.
Let's recap. The
client owns two related entities here with hundreds of thousands of
dollars in income. You want to make a change that will have zero
net effect on the client's overall income, create unnecessary confusion
and probably a couple phone calls from the client which I'll have to
deal with and rationalize your short-sighted decision to the client, and
then next year you'll want to reverse the entry and make a new entry to
start the process all over again. I understand and accept your
insecurity and desire to feel important by consistently writing 15 review notes when there is nothing you can
find wrong with a tax return, but give me a break.
Correct the mispellings in
your memo.
You mean
the part where you misspelled misspelling?
?
Sorry, my telepathy
isn't what it used to be. When you're done "?"ing with yourself, can
you please explain what you mean in English?
What is this?
Looks to me
like a dumbass review note, but you would know best.
You should assume the reviewer
is an idiot when referencing the workpapers.
Thanks,
didn't need to be told that.
Back to top
The Roots of All Evil
ASAP
Attrition
Backlog Reports
Budgets
Cover Letters
Formal Dress Codes
General Marketing
Hourly Billing
Leverage & Partial
Delegation
Overhead
Overtime
Recruiting Propaganda
Seniority
The Gang-Rape
System
Timesheet
Recaps
Workpaper Proliferation
Back to top
ASAP
"A good manager is best
when people barely know he exists; not so good when
people obey and acclaim him; worse when they despise
him."-
Lao Tsu, 6th Century BC
Around 80% of drivers
think they are above average at driving. I'd guess
a similar percentage of partners and managers in CPA
firms think their clients and projects are of above
average importance relative to the work the rest of the
firm does.
In larger public accounting firms
some staff people have up to ten different bosses for whom they do work. Staff
people are told to work on projects using the FIFO
system: first-in, first-out, Makes sense in
theory, but FIFO is difficult to enforce and most people
end up working on what they feel like most of the time.
Besides, strict adherence to
FIFO doesn't allow a staff person to differentiate
between a truly urgent project and a less urgent one.
Tax partners and
managers will often assign work out to staff with no clear
communication of when they need the work completed, wait
a little while, become restless, then start bugging the
staff for status reports on when the work will be
completed (thus further delaying the task of actually
doing the work). With ten different bosses
assigning out projects that have ASAP or no deadline
specified, it becomes difficult for staff
people to effectively prioritize. The primary motivation becomes to avoid hassles.
Sometimes a manager will race
over to a staff person's desk, stress the urgency of the
project, the staff person stays late that day finishing the
project, then the manager doesn't review it for three
weeks. The staff person gets the project back in three
weeks with review notes which must be cleared ASAP.
When the staff person doesn't clear the review notes within a
day, he gets a phone call or an e-mail from the manager
asking "what is the status of......?" He rushes to
finish up. Then two more weeks pass before the
project finally goes out the door.
Folks, it's just
paperwork for the most part. An extra day or two
spent to get it right probably isn't going to hurt
anyone. ASAP has been abused to the point where it
has lost its
importance ("important" has also lost its importance,
but I digress).
If a manager has
to ask about the status of a project it is probably
because he or she didn't clearly define the timetable
for the project and obtain the staff person's buy-in on it.
We would all do well to remember the law of the 6 P's:
Proper Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance.
Back
to The Roots of All Evil
Attrition
Most accounting firms are
so focused on recruiting they overlook that if
they just did a better job on employee retention, they
wouldn't need to devote so many resources to recruiting
in the first place.
Imagine the perfect
accounting firm where all employees are 100% happy 100%
of the time. Would that firm need to devote much
attention to recruiting? Probably not, as most of
the happy employees would 1) not leave, and 2) talk to
their friends at other firms about their great jobs,
and some of those friends would eventually want to leave
their unhappy jobs to come work at the happy firm.
Back in the real world, attrition hovers somewhere
around 10% of staff per year for local CPA firms and
20-30% for the large national firms. An attrition
rate of 20% per year means that two-thirds of the current employees are gone
in five years, 90% are gone in ten years.
High turnover hurts
morale, doesn't allow accounting firms to earn back
their investment in training,
results in a critical
loss of expertise, loss of productivity, additional
out-of-pocket expenditures for recruiting and training,
and sometimes loss of clients as well.
The costs of
replacing someone include exit interviews, exit paperwork,
bloated human resource departments whose payrolls could
go towards paying more to staff, severance pay,
advertising, headhunting fees, employee referral fees
(up to $10,000 these days), lost revenue from partner and
staff time taken up in interviews, lunches, recruiting
events, and meetings to discuss new job hires, training
materials, lost revenue from training new employees, new
stationery, business cards, parking passes,
etc.
Of course attrition is
healthy to the
extent it weeds out the employees you don't want,
the mediocre ones who don't really care and to some extent
function as interchangeable parts doing low
level work. But people are not
commodities, and star workers certainly are not
interchangeable.
What amazes me is that
some firms don't try very hard to keep their superstars. They're too proud to say, "we need you, you
help make this place work, tell us honestly what is bothering you and what we can do to make
it better, we value you far too much and we can't accept
your resignation."
The former managing partner at a
firm I know was fond of saying, "it is not our job to
make our employees happy." This partner happens to be a really nice guy, but maybe his
attitude towards employees was partly responsible for the
unusually high turnover his firm experienced.
Compare this to the
attitude of a managing partner at another firm that is rapidly growing. This guy's attitude is
180 degrees opposite. If an employee he likes
tries to leave, he basically refuses to let them go,
doing whatever he can to accommodate the employee and
get them to stay. While it doesn't always work,
often times the employee is leaving over some silly,
easily-solved problem, which the partner figures out
simply by listening and then taking the necessary action
to make things right. The result of making the extra
effort is that this partner has a core group of
dedicated employees that are loyal to him and have stayed with him since the beginning of his
practice.
One other strategy smart firms use is hiring on the basis of whether or not the
applicant is qualified, not on whether the firm currently
needs them. Many firms only hire when they have a
slot to fill. Doesn't matter if they have two
superstar candidates, there's only one slot.
These firms can get
burned later by attrition. They lose someone
and then it's a mad scramble to find someone to fill the
position, even if they aren't qualified. The
result is that potential stellar employees get passed up in the
hiring process when times are good, lackluster employees
get hired when times are bad, and overall the
organization ends up with lower quality personnel.
Back
to The Roots of All Evil
Backlog Reports
(a.k.a. WIP Reports, TPS Reports)
Every Monday some firms require their
staff people to complete a spreadsheet listing all the projects they are
working on and how many hours they estimate it will take to complete
each project.
From this report the managers and partners are
supposed to be able to figure out which staff people are low on work and assign
more projects to them accordingly.
The firm then has people who devote a significant portion of their time to monitoring
these backlog reports. If a staff person neglects to include a certain entry
on their backlog report or drag themselves out of bed early enough to
hand the report in by the Monday morning deadline, they get an annoying
phone call(s) or e-mail asking them to fix the report.
It's similar to a scene from the movie
Office Space:
Monday Morning, 9:15....
Annoying Boss
1: Hello Peter. What's
happening? Uh, we have sort of a problem here. Yeah, you apparently
didn't put one of the new cover sheets on your TPS reports.
Peter Gibbons:
Oh, yeah, I'm sorry about that, I forgot.
Annoying Boss
1: Um, yeah, you see we're
putting the new cover sheets on all TPS reports now before they go out.
Did you see the memo about this?
Peter Gibbons:
Yeah, I have the memo right here, I just forgot, but it's not shipping
out until tomorrow, so there's no problem.
Annoying Boss
1: Yeah, if you could just
go ahead and make sure you do that from now on, that would be great.
And, uh, I'll go ahead and make sure you get another copy of that memo.
M'kay? Bye bye Peter.
[A couple minutes later]....
Annoying Boss
2: Hi, Peter. What's
happening? We need to talk about your TPS reports.
Peter Gibbons:
Yeah. The coversheet. I know, I know. Bill talked to me about it.
Annoying Boss 2:
Yeah, did you get that memo?
Peter Gibbons:
Yeah. I got the memo. And I understand the policy. And the problem is, I
just forgot this one time. And I've already taken care of it so it's not
even really a problem anymore.
Annoying Boss 2:
Uh, Yeah. It's just that we're putting new coversheets on all the TPS
reports before they go out now. So if you could go ahead and try to
remember to do that from now on, that would be great. Alright!
[Phone rings 5 seconds later]....
Peter Gibbons:
"Peter Gibbons"
[Voice on the other end]
Peter Gibbons:
"Yes, I have the memo"....
There are managers who follow
these backlog reports almost religiously. These managers will call a staff person up on a
Thursday and say something to the effect of: "I see you have 25 hours on
your backlog report. I need you to do this project so I expect
you'll be able to get to it in 2 days based on your backlog."
Whatever was on that report Monday
probably bears little resemblance to the reality of the staff's workload
on Thursday. Old work has gone out, new work has come in, clients
have called up with emergencies that need to be handled right away, the
Monday report was just a grossly inaccurate approximation anyway, etc.
Yet the manager acts as if Monday's report
is a reliable predictor of the staff's workload over the next few days
even though the staff person has ten other bosses who are constantly
assigning new work irrespective of the backlog and usually want their stuff ASAP as well.
There are other managers who routinely
review every staff person's backlog and send changes to the staff
requesting that their backlog reports be amended. Once the staff
person wastes the necessary time amending and resubmitting their backlog
report, the manager proceeds to waste everybody else's time by sending an e-mail
with the revised backlog to all partners and managers
informing them that the backlog report has been changed. Don't these people have clients they
could be worrying about instead?
A partner at one firm has been known to
levy harsh penalties on staff for not keeping their backlogs up
to date. In one case a staff person was working almost 80 hours
per week during tax season but didn't show all her projects on her
backlog. The partner came by and dropped a bunch of
additional work on the staff person. The staff person explained she didn't have time
to complete the additional work before April 15th due to her already
overbearing workload. "Tough, you didn't put it on your backlog,
you must not be that busy".
Not keeping backlog reports up to date is
even cited as a "weakness" or "area for improvement" in annual
performance reviews.
More Office Space.......
Outside
Consultant: I'd like to move us right along to a Peter
Gibbons. Now, we had a chance to meet this young man, and wow,
that's just a straight-shooter with upper management written all over
him.
Annoying Boss
1: Yeah, Um. I'm gonna have to go ahead and sort of
disagree with you there. Yeah..... He's been having some problems with
his TPS reports.
Outside
Consultant: Bill, let me ask you a real quick question
here. How much time would you say you spend each week dealing with
these TPS reports?
Annoying Boss 1:
Uh, Yeah.
And that's really the issue. How
much time is being spent on these backlog reports that could be spent
more productively on coming up with ways to help clients? Backlog reports provide an illusion of
control. They allow the bureaucrats in all of us to think we are
managing without actually doing any effective management at all.
Back
to The Roots of All Evil
Budgets
"Welcome to 'Whose Line Is It Anyways?',
where everything is made up and the points don't matter."
- Drew Carey, from the show Whose Line
Is It Anyways?
Managers and partners give staff overly
precise and often unrealistic budgets to complete projects. The
normal result is that projects go over budget due to
Parkinson's
law: work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
In cases where staff can complete a
project under budget, they often waste enough time chatting, surfing
the Internet, etc. to bring the time spent equal to budget. The
budget, which often starts out as a total guesstimate, becomes a self-fulfilling
prophecy.
Then there is the practice of eating time.
People generally want to do well. If you give a staff person a
budget of 4 hours but they take 6 hours to complete the project, there
is a tendency to feel inadequate. To hide the inadequacy, the staff
person may "eat" two hours of time. They end up working for free
to appear "normal".
"Don't eat time" the typical
firm motto goes.
Sounds noble, but it's crap. Staff get hassled on specific
projects when they exceed budgets but then are told in general, don't
eat time.
"Oh no! We went over-budget by $2,000".
Really? $2,000 is a fictitious amount based on a hypothetical billing rate. What you
actually paid the staff member for the extra time was $400.
Unrealistic budgets can cost clients big
dollars. I've seen several cases where CPA's have been so focused on meeting budgets and following the prior
year that they've missed
hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax credits. Overlook $200,000 in savings in an attempt to save maybe $2,000.
Missed tax credits usually place in the top ten each year for reasons
accountants get sued.
Time budgets create pressure and cause
mistakes since speed over quality becomes the emphasis. Arguably,
budgets also end up increasing project time over the long-term.
When everyone is rushing to complete projects, they don't take the time
to learn the material properly and get it right the next time.
What if the best way to decrease long-term project
time is to make sure that staff people are learning from their mistakes on each
project they do? In other words, get people motivated about the work, about improving
and getting good at what they do, and the budgets will eventually take
care of themselves. After all, it's rare that a project done right the first time
goes over-budget.
Back
to The Roots of All Evil
Cover Letters &
Snail Mail
How much of the crap you get in the mail
do you actually read?
We're selling tax advice, not classic
literature. Do our clients really want to read a two-page cover
letter for a simple tax extension when one page of the extension letter
is just disclaimers?
Here's how the process works at one firm
for tax extensions:
The partner
assigns the extension down through the ranks to a staff person. The staff
person
prepares and prints out the extension along with a cover letter. A
manager reviews the extension and cover letter and makes changes, or
gives it back to the staff person to make changes. The letter and
extension are then routed to a secretary to put on firm letterhead, to
the partner for signature, then back to the secretary. The
secretary prepares one extension for mailing to the IRS, a second copy
with the cover letter to mail to the client, and a third copy with cover
letter for the file, which is then routed back to the staff person. A
second administrative person runs the envelopes with the extension
through the metered mail machine to affix postage. A third
administrative person then does a mail run later in the day to send out
the extensions. The client receives the extension in the mail a
few days later. It has his social security number and other
personal information on it, so instead of just throwing it away he must
go through the hassle of shredding it to guard against identity theft.
Three weeks later he also receives a bill for the extension.
One of my first mentors left a CPA firm I
was at early in my career and ending up working for one of the firm's
clients. Having been a manager at the CPA firm, she knew all the
inefficiencies. She would request just the tax extension, no cover letter.
What would she get? Two page cover letter, extension, and a separate charge for the
extension. Per entity. Not happy. She
eventually fired the partner in charge of the account.
The same principle applies to most
everything accountants write. If a client calls with a tax
question, it doesn't necessarily mean they want an 8-page memo sent to
them in return. Sure, clients are interested in the basic logic
behind the conclusions and
recommendations, but most just want a simple, straightforward
recommendation without a whole lot of brain damage involved.
Clients have better things to do with
their lives than read intricate cover letters from CPA's at their expense.
The same goes for email disclaimers, especially the "Please consider the
environment before printing this email" footnote that inevitably results
in a one page email becoming a two-page email when it is printed out.
Back
to The Roots of All Evil
Formal Dress Codes
Pretty much everyone wears casual attire
to work on the weekends.
It's funny how when people are given a choice, even those who say they
prefer formal or business casual attire end up dressing casual.
There is one strong argument against
casual clothing at work: clients. If you have a meeting with
clients you should be dressed at least to match their attire. But most of our contact with
clients is over the phone or through e-mail, especially in Los Angeles
where it is a hassle to drive anywhere. When clients do come to the
office, most firms
have conference rooms to meet in. Clients never
need to see the rest of the office.
Do formal and even business casual
dress codes hurt clients? There are some very smart,
extremely productive people who refuse to work for a company or in
an industry that
does not allow a casual dress code. They go to work for the
company's competitors instead, placing formally dressed companies at a
competitive disadvantage, and leaving less qualified candidates
to serve the clients. How many potentially great CPA's went to
work for Google instead? We'll never know.
What is the benefit of making workers who have zero
face-to-face client contact dress up in costumes that are uncomfortable
to work in? How does forcing people to waste time and money on
ironing, shoe-shining, and dry-cleaning help a company increase its
profits? If someone who doesn't meet with clients shows up in
comfortable black tennis shoes instead of uncomfortable black leather
shoes, do profits decrease? If most people prefer wearing casual when
given the chance, they don't have face-to-face client contact, and
everyone already knows what everybody else looks like in casual, why not
just make every day casual?
Some people want to dress up. Go for
it, more power to you. But in the same way that I have no desire
to make you dress casual, why would you feel the need to make me dress
formal? I'm okay, you're okay.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not lobbying for
bathing suits and body piercing to replace business casual. All
I'm saying is that if workers were allowed to wear nice jeans, tennis
shoes, sandals and T-shirts to work in addition to the regular business
casual attire, many people would feel more comfortable, more productive, and be
more willing to work longer hours. How bad could this be for
clients?
Back
to The Roots of All Evil
General Marketing
Every minute you spend on marketing is a minute you're not spending trying to figure out how to
help your existing clients. If you just do great work and by doing
so you turn your clients into your best salespeople, do you even need general marketing?
Back
to The Roots of All Evil
Hourly Billing
Others have made the case against hourly
billing far more eloquently than I can.
Ron Baker probably summed
it up best:
What If Airlines
Billed Like CPAs?
"Let us pretend
that I went to an airline counter to ask for a ticket to Chicago.
"No problem, Mr.
Baker, window or aisle," the agent replies.
"How much does it
cost," I ask, as he proceeds to book the ticket.
"Obviously, Mr.
Baker, you do not understand the complexity of the airline business,"
the agent replies. "There are a myriad of variables that affect the cost
of flying from San Francisco to Chicago: weather, airport traffic,
tailwinds, headwinds, passenger and luggage weight, whether or not the
pilot utilizes computerized navigation and/or auto-land, and how long the
flight and cabin crews have worked here at the airline, just to name a
few...
"Now, Mr. Baker,
you just board the plane. We will fly you there safely, and send you a
bill in approximately 30 days detailing the charges for everything we
did. Of course, it goes without saying that we will be very thorough and
honest. If I attempted to quote you a price now, it might not be enough
to cover all of the airline's expenses, and we would lose money, which
would not be fair to us. Alternatively, I could charge you too much, and
then you would be an unhappy customer, which we do not want either. Have
a nice flight."
Sound ludicrous?
It is. But the analogy conveys the attitude of CPAs who refuse to quote
prices at the start of an engagement."
I recommend the following links if you are
interested in a more serious discussion of the merits and drawbacks of
hourly billing. A couple of these articles are focused on lawyers,
but the same principles apply to accountants:
The short, unhappy history of how lawyers bill their clients
The Theory Behind
Pricing and How CPA's Bill Clients
How to Implement
Value Pricing Into an Accounting Practice
Hourly Billing
Limits Profitability
Change Orders &
Innovative Pricing Methods
Pricing Psychology
To Raise Your
Prices, Change Your Theory
How lawyers and accountants steal from clients through hourly billing
Why
Hourly Billing Sucks
Some additional observations:
If you are a CPA with many years of
experience, you sell a client on how much of an expert you are and how
you've dealt with many similar clients in their industry, how does it look to the client when you are unable
to quote them a fixed price for the engagement? If you have so
much experience, don't you also know roughly how much it will cost?
If I spend an hour and save a client
$500,000, on an hourly basis their bill would be a few hundred dollars. If I spend
an hour doing work of no value to the client, the bill is still a few
hundred dollars.
If I make the same amount per billable hour,
what is the incentive to search for ways to save clients money?
What incentive is there to work
efficiently on an hourly basis? The product is billable hours.
Maximizing revenue means running up as many billable hours as possible.
If my investment in technology and
personal growth allows me to complete a task in one-third the time it
used to take, does that task become two-thirds less valuable to the client?
Most firms actually bill their clients for
billing. Not only is the time incurred to prepare the bill charged
to the client, but if the client calls to complain about the bill, that
time is also billed to the client. It's a rare example
where calling to complain can actually make your bill go up. Some
partners and managers spend up to 10% of their time dealing with
billing, time that could otherwise be spent helping clients.
Back
to The Roots of All Evil
Leverage & Partial Delegation
A friend of mine
received a bill from her company’s CPA firm. The bill was for a
California single-member limited liability company tax return, which is
probably the simplest type of tax return in public accounting, requiring
only three pages and a gross receipts calculation. The detail
for the bill showed that six (6) different people worked on the tax
return. What is wrong with this picture?
I read an article in
one of the major accounting magazines claiming that the five
critical success factors for a CPA firm are “leverage, productivity,
rate, write-ups or write-downs, and efficiency”. The article continued,
citing some CPA guru, “The key to firm profitability is leverage and
rates… the ability of partners to leverage themselves by maximizing the
number of staff they can keep busy." (Noticeably absent from this list
is any mention of making the customer happy).
If leverage is so
profitable, why does the average partner in the CPA industry earn less
than their hourly billing rate multiplied by hours billed annually?
Where are all the supposed profits from the staff people the partner is
“leveraging”? If leverage is so efficient, why does it typically take
three levels of review and several weeks to get a tax return out the
door? What is productive about keeping six people busy working on a
three-page tax return?
I have no quarrel with delegation in theory. The problem is that the
traditional CPA firm doesn’t truly delegate- it micromanages and
duplicates work. Effective delegation requires that, among other
things, you give the person you are delegating to full authority for
decisions, make them fully accountable for completion of the project,
and focus on the results, not the process by which the job is done.
Effective delegation
is nowhere to be found in the tax department of the typical CPA firm.
The staff person preparing the tax return has almost no authority to
make decisions when their work is subject to three levels of review
(senior, manager, partner). The staff person has little
accountability for completion of the project since once they finish
preparation the project can sit on three other workers’ desks often for
several weeks before the project is reviewed. Lastly, the staff person
has little control over how to complete the project when they are
generally told to “just follow last year”, regardless of how inefficient
or erroneous last year’s approach may have been.
The problem starts
with partners who want to sign off on everything that goes out the door,
from the most complex tax returns to the simplest three-page LLC return.
This creates a bottleneck right off the bat. The solution is to
delegate less complex projects entirely to the managers, seniors,
and staff.
In the case of a
three-page single member LLC tax return for California, there are really
only two ways to botch it: get the gross receipts wrong, or get the tax
payments made during the year wrong. Both are pretty hard to screw up.
This type of return does not require six different people to be
involved.
Some may argue that
partners need to be involved with everything that goes out the door in
order to ensure quality control. But if a firm does not trust its
managers, seniors and staff to handle less complex projects entirely
themselves, the root of the problem is lack of training. The firm
could take the time it is currently wasting on excessive levels of
review and use it to train lower level employees thoroughly on handling
less complex projects themselves, thereby eliminating the need for
multiple levels of review on simpler projects.
Another problem with
delegation the way it is currently done is that partners end up spending
a huge chunk of their time on administration rather than client
service. The article I mentioned above quotes a partner at one firm
bragging that, “I can monitor our realization on an hourly basis. I
spend 60 to 70 percent of my time monitoring and running the practice”.
The article went on to cite that "innovations" in this guy’s firm
included “recording time by exact minutes instead of fractions of an
hour, examining every bill” and “receipt of daily cash reports and
monthly, detailed financial statements”. CPA-style delegation has
turned this guy from someone who primarily helps clients to someone who
is primarily a bureaucrat monitoring reports that are likely just
garbage in, garbage out, keeping him from his true role of leadership.
Even when delegation is
more profitable, it isn’t necessarily more fun. No one wants to be a
machine part on an assembly line, but that is exactly how typical
delegation in CPA firms makes most managers, seniors and staff feel.
Kids don’t dream about becoming assembly line parts when they grow up;
they want to be super heroes, rock stars,
astronauts, etc; people who do
interesting things and make a difference in the world.
A lot of accountants I
know like
playing the
puzzle game
Sudoku. Imagine that
instead of playing Sudoku, you were only allowed to review other
people’s completed puzzles. Would you want to do it?
No way.
You want to
be the one doing the puzzle because it’s more fun that way. To some
extent it is the same way with tax returns. Unless you are the one
preparing the return or communicating with the client and running the
show, CPA work can be pretty boring and unfulfilling. Perhaps this is
partly why so many firms have such trouble retaining tax managers and
seniors (the middle-management of CPA firms). Why be an assembly line
worker when you can bail public accounting for something more creative
and less stressful?
Another
thought: why three levels of review? Why not two, or four? Do the
second and third levels of review really add enough value to be worth
it, or is it just paranoia?
Let’s reduce it to the
ridiculous. Imagine a firm with fifty people and forty-nine levels
of review, where every person in the firm is involved in reviewing every
single tax return that goes out the door. The average tax return with
forty-nine
people reviewing it, one after another, would probably take a year to
complete (one week for each person to let it sit in their inbox, review
it, write corrections, route to someone else’s inbox where it will sit,
etc). Almost by definition, nothing would get done on time since the
extended due date for a tax return is at most 9.5 months after
year-end.
With no one person
responsible for the project, and with every worker responsible for many
times his or her usual workload (since every person in the firm has to
review every tax return), my guess is that quality would be extremely
poor. Why do a good job if forty-nine people above you are there as a
safety net? Who would have time to focus enough on the client to
identify all the tax-saving opportunities? Who would even remember
the names or details of most clients?
The point is that the
more levels of review there are, the slower and worse service the client
typically gets. Excellence requires focus and pride of ownership. This
is not possible when workers are involved in too many projects, none of
which they are ultimately in control of.
I once tried an experiment
with several staff people, telling them that I didn’t have time to review a
particular tax return, so just do their best, spend the extra time
reviewing it line by line to make sure it is right, and then give me the
return and assignment docket so I can sign off on it. Then of course I
cheated by reviewing the return and making any corrections myself.
But what I found
surprised me: when the staff thought there was no safety net, that their
work was essentially going straight to the client, the improvement in
their work was substantial. The typical mistakes buried in statement #38 of
the tax return and other places where staff don’t typically self-check
their work were caught. There is something to the concept of pride of
ownership.
Most CPA firms have smart
people who genuinely want to
do a great job, but are not given a realistic opportunity to do so.
It would be wiser
to create an environment that allows people to reach their potential
rather than automatically treating everyone as mere parts on an assembly
line.
Back
to The Roots of All Evil
Overhead
If CPA billing rates are
so high (and they are), why aren't partners getting
filthy rich? We so often hear that "the key to firm
profitability is leveraging employees". But if leveraging is so profitable, why can't
most partners even make back their own billing rates
multiplied by their number of billable hours?
Fancy offices, partially
non-billable tax and audit staff, secretaries,
receptionists, office managers, human resources,
marketing coordinators, IT staff, file clerks, staff
training, elaborate telephone systems, complex computer
equipment and file servers, industrial size printers and
copiers, fancy office furniture, office supplies,
advertising, increased liability insurance, etc.
The end result of leverage
is overhead. There is a myth that certain CPA firms
charge more than others because they are better.
The reality is usually that the overhead is just higher.
This is the electronic
age. Physical libraries are obsolete and
everybody from the guy working out of his garage to the
partner at the $20 million accounting firm pretty much
has access to the same resources.
The old image of standing
around the water cooler asking some guy at your big firm
with 20 years experience and a wealth of accumulated
knowledge about the application of tax law to a specific
fact pattern is vanishing. Now we just do a keyword
search in the the tax research software and we get
everything we could ever want to know about the topic in
minutes.
For sole proprietors who
play their cards right, the only substantial overhead
they face nowadays is the tax preparation and research
software. Armed with these two tools and some $1,000
tax
projection software, a competent
CPA working out of his garage can offer the same tax service to individuals and small business as any big
firm, but he can do it without the overhead.
Every dollar spent by a
CPA firm on overhead is an extra dollar paid by the
client to cover the expense. As the Internet advances, information flows
more freely, and pricing becomes more transparent,
clients are gradually figuring out that
most of what they are paying for with higher rates is
overhead and image.
I realize that people love
overhead to some extent. They like having their
own fancy offices in the downtown high-rent district
with their secretaries and all the other bells and
whistles that make them feel prestigious. But
fancy tastes and image are not the future.
Technology is.
Some possible steps to
consider to cut down the overhead:
Move to a lower-rent area.
You can also reduce your square footage requirements by
at least half if you abandon the idea of walls and
separate offices for everyone and switch to an open-area
workspace and a couple conference rooms
for clients. Your fancy office doesn't
provide any real value to your clients, and next to
payroll, rent is likely your largest expense.
Use VPN's and remote
desktops so that people can work from home. More
people working from home = less required office space
and overhead.
Ditch your library and the
filing services you pay to update it. Do the research electronically instead. Not only will
this save you on rent (less space needed) and payroll,
but electronic research is also vastly more efficient
than paper once you get the hang of it.
Get rid of your paper.
Printing, copying, sorting, filing, mailing, routing
paper files, lost revenue from time spent looking for
paper files, storage space, etc. All this stuff
costs huge amounts of money. Go paperless.
Start saving and organizing documents on the network so
people can access them from anywhere. Contrary to
popular opinion, you generally don't need an expensive
paperless document management system to accomplish this
(in fact such a system may be even worse than paper).
Windows Explorer is already installed on your computer.
It is fast, intuitive, flexible, customizable, and best of all,
free. Combine this with Google Desktop Search and you
have pretty much everything you need. Just be sure you backup your data.
Focus on the real work.
Eliminate the bulk of your weekly meetings, committees,
and all the nonproductive projects, studies and reports
they produce that take away from the only job function
that generates any revenue: helping
clients.
De-leverage. Figure
out how to do it yourself for less. Once you get
rid of all the paper and the committees that generate it you don't need to hire as many
paper pushers. Use the opportunity to downsize your office manager/firm administrators,
marketing department, HR department, admin, etc. and
figure out a way to do without the bureaucracy. As
much as all of these functions are probably staffed by
wonderful people who seem indispensable, most aren't
contributing to your bottom line.
Back
to The Roots of All Evil
Overtime
"This is your life, and it's ending one
minute at a time.... Advertising has us chasing cars and
clothes, working jobs we hate, to buy shit we don't need.... You are not your job. You're not the
amount of money you have in the bank. You're not the car you
drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not
your fucking khakis....."
- Chuck Palahniuk, from the book & movie
Fight Club
"At our partner lunches people talk about
how it's awful that summer camp doesn't cover the entire summer, or how
they don't know how to avoid giving the nanny a holiday bonus, or how
they don't know why their kids hate them. They hate us because we're
never home. They hate us because we're pulling out our Blackberries all
weekend while we pretend (and they can tell when we're pretending) to
enjoy being around them. They hate us because work is #1, and they're #2
-- or #3, or #4.
It's sad. Because it's not like years from
now we're going to regret not checking the Blackberry more often. It's
sad because time passes really quickly and it starts to feel like "too
late" very quickly. That's what keeps people here. By the time, maybe
eight months into your first year, maybe a year a half -- but not much
longer than that in most cases -- by the time you realize what this job
is doing to you it feels like you're stuck. "It's too late." And so you
hope it gets better. And you hope, and you hope, and you work, and you
work -- and then it's no better, and even more so, "it's too late."
And then you may as well stick around and
try and make partner, and then if you're lucky enough and skilled enough
and effective enough at what you do, and the right people know it, you
make partner, and you think it's all going to change. And a lot does
change. But the hours are still long, and there's still a hierarchy so
you're never really at the top of the totem pole, and the money jumps
but the pressure doesn't really slow down, and the people you compare
yourself to change, and you aren't really relaxed about it... and it
really is "too late" now, because this has gone from a job to a career,
and you're stuck. And you never see your kids. And they hate you. And
then you don't even want to go home, and so you stay at the office, and
the spiral continues...
I just woke up to an e-mail from an
associate who's been looking more and more pregnant recently, but was in
the office as recently as yesterday. 'I just gave birth to a daughter,
[name], this morning at 4:13 A.M. So I will not be in the office today.
I will be checking my Blackberry throughout the day, so feel free to let
me know if you need anything. Thanks.'........
I don't say this lightly, but I don't
believe there is any way for a good person to work at a place like this
without destroying whatever makes him or her good. I see interesting,
kind, creative people come in and quickly turn cold. At first, it was
the speed that shocked me. This takes over their lives, and suddenly
what made them human vanishes. Their souls get swallowed. Before they
can do anything about it. And they resign themselves to their fates.
As corporate drones, completing repetitive, mind-numbing tasks for
outrageous salaries and little else. Tell me I'm wrong. Tell me it's
all just my imagination running wild. Tell me it's this four-hour
meeting I just escaped from, that took us through dinner, and whatever
semblance of an evening I thought I would have, and that's it not the
reality. This wasn't supposed to be the life I ended up with."
- From the website
Anonymous Lawyer
I'm beginning to think overtime is more a personality
disorder than a necessity in the accounting profession. One of my economics professors in college
used to argue that you never see doctors lounging around on the beach
during the day because their time is too valuable. They make at
least $100 per hour so to be at the beach costs them too much.
Taking time to enjoy life costs too much?
Even if he's right, is this any way to think about life? If the purpose of work
is to enhance life, why do we treat it the other way around? If you make five times per hour what most
other people make, shouldn't that mean you have five times as much free
time to lounge around on the beach?
In the 1950's the American Bar Association
reported that billable hours should average about 1,300 per year. I
don't have any statistics on 1950's accountants, but I assume it was
about the same. Nowadays we have amazing Internet tax research
tools and tax preparation software that can accomplish tasks with
efficiencies undreamed of in the 1950's. Yet today the minimum
billable hours quotas for most CPA firms are at 1,800 annually.
What happened?
Part of the problem may lie with
hourly billing.
The product we sell is billable hours, so maximizing revenue necessarily
means maximizing hours worked. Looking at the Forbes 400 or any
similar list of extremely wealthy people, few if any got rich using this
model. The wealthiest (self-made) people certainly worked hard to
achieve their wealth, but more importantly they worked smart.
Working smart involves taking a step back
from billable hours and thinking seriously about how to make the work we
do more valuable. Most CPA firms give lip service to this
concept in the form of continuing professional education. But what
I've often seen in practice is that when employees attempt to bill any
significant amount of time to actual process improvement, they get questioning
phone calls requesting that the time be reclassified to "personal time"
for which the employee doesn't get paid. "Professional reading is
something that should be done on your own time" I've heard one CPA
firm partner
say. What message is this sending?
The end result is that when clients ask what can be done
to lower their tax bills, I've heard CPA's respond with "not much
really". Maybe if we shifted the focus from "how do
we maximize billable hours?" to "how do we maximize tax savings
and accumulate wealth for
clients?", and charged accordingly, we could come up with some better
tax planning ideas than "not much really".
If we took some "quality time" away from
our timesheets to read about new ideas, randomly chat with clients, or
even just brainstorm (try writing down 10 ideas to save a particular
client money no matter how ridiculous the ideas may seem at first, one
or two might actually end up being great ideas), we might become more
valuable to the people we serve than just the product of our
billable hours times billing rate.
Perhaps as a result of focusing on the
billable hours rather than on tax savings and wealth accumulation for
the clients, everyone seems to think that overtime is a necessary
evil in the CPA profession. Is it?
We nearly kill ourselves working overtime
from February through the middle of April. Come May staff people are
sending out e-mails asking if anyone has any work for them. In reality
there is no April 15th filing deadline. Corporate returns can
easily be extended through September 15th, individuals and partnerships
through October 15th. The work doesn't all have to be done by
April 15th. Why do we act like it does?
Here's a thought: extend tax
returns whenever it is feasible. Do the projection work in November and
December to figure out about how much the client owes, have the clients
pay in their taxes based on that, then spread the time-consuming tax
preparation work out evenly through the year. If something comes
up you didn't anticipate in the projection, plug the new piece of
information into the tax projection software and adjust accordingly.
It isn't rocket science.
Some clients absolutely refuse to extend.
File their returns early and charge more for your work than you
would for a client who is more flexible and willing to extend. But
for everyone else, at least make an effort to educate them that the
filing deadlines generally don't matter as long as you pay in your tax
on time. Some clients will actually appreciate not having to rush
to get all their tax documents to you by Mid-March so you can finish
their returns by April 15th.
If you use January to do any payroll tax
and 1099 work (or better yet just go on vacation), February through Mid-April to prepare the urgent returns
for clients who won't extend, Mid-April through October 15th to prepare
the bulk of the returns, and November and December to focus on
projections, you might actually find that you can stay busy the whole
year without working a whole lot of overtime.
But that's just my $.02, I could be
completely wrong. Perhaps we are just meant to suffer, to hire
seasonal staff at huge extra expense for tax season and then pay regular
staff to do nothing for a good chunk of the non-busy season, to get
premature gray hair from the stress, to miss our families, to work some
people so hard that it drives them out of public accounting even though
they generally like the work.
A staff person once told me he got
a phone call from his mentor during tax season questioning why he had
less than 10 billable hours the previous day. This person does good
work and has great potential; I hope he stays in public accounting. Too bad the industry
doesn't make it easier for
people to want
to stay.
My first mentor left the CPA firm I was at
partly because she hated the overtime. I don't
understand why they didn't just let her work less hours. Everybody
loved working with her. Why do CPA firms think it is better to lose someone
completely than to let them work 200-300 less hours during the year?
Back
to The Roots of All Evil
Recruiting Propaganda
“I’m not a line item,
damnit, I’m a column!”
-Anonymous
staff person
There is a movie
called Crazy People that came out in the early ‘90’s about an ad
executive, Emory Leeson, who gets tired of creating phony ads. He
decides to take a different approach to advertising: telling the brutal truth.
His colleagues are so shocked by the honest ads he comes up with, they
decide he is crazy and send him to a mental institution.
At the institution, Emory
meets other crazy people, and somehow they start writing ads together.
When Emory’s ad agency accidentally runs a bunch of the honest ads, the
firm is amazed that consumers love the ads and sales for the products go
through the roof:
“Metamucil: It helps
you go to the toilet. If you don’t use it, you will get cancer and
die.”
“Continental Express: We’ll
screw the other guy to get your package there on time.”
“Jaguar: For men who
want hand jobs from beautiful women they hardly know."
“Porsche: It’s a
little too small to get laid in, but you get laid the minute you get
out."
“Volvo: Boxy, but
good."
“Come in the Bahamas.”
The movie itself isn’t
all that great, but it’s the message that’s important: people want
honesty and will respond when you give it to them. Which brings me to BS
in the public accounting recruiting process.
Below are some
excerpts from the recruiting materials of various firms, both large and
small, followed by how it really works.
Apologies if what follows describes your situation exactly. I’m not trying to pick on any
one firm:
Why (Our Firm)?
“Our firm culture is
infused with creativity, integrity and humanity.”
Upon
starting, most large firms will stick you in a cubicle under fluorescent
lights and no windows in the middle of a cube farm, give you a policies and
procedures manual to follow, provide you with mundane work subject to
multiple levels of review that second and third-guess your work, make you track every 6 minutes or quarter
hour of your day on a timesheet and submit backlog reports and time
recaps weekly, require you to sign in when you get in to work and sign
out when you leave, harass you about meeting budgets, pressure you to
work huge amounts of overtime during “busy seasons” which end up lasting
half the year, judge you almost solely by your billable hours, tell you
to "just follow last year" when you have questions "because that's the
way we've always done it", and refer any bright ideas you might have
about improving things to the appropriate committee where the idea will
either be ignored or endlessly debated while nothing happens.
“You
are an individual, and not a line item on a spreadsheet, to the partners
and those who make decisions about your future.”
While a
few partners might be able to associate your name with a picture of you,
and some might even occasionally talk to you during scheduled annual
lunches designed to improve morale, the majority of attention you
receive from the partners will consist of them seeing your name listed
on a spreadsheet comparing staff by hours worked. Your name will
show up on a daily time and chargeability spreadsheet, the weekly
office project backlog spreadsheet, the weekly time and chargeability
spreadsheet, the bi-monthly time recap spreadsheet, the monthly time and chargeability spreadsheet, and a host of other
spreadsheets designed to monitor your billable hours and ensure you
don’t have much of a life outside the office during the “busy seasons”. Fortunately, you will not
be merely a line item in all of these spreadsheets. On several, you
will actually have an entire column devoted to you.
“We work with some of
the most successful and exciting clients, who range from self-made
billionaires to high profile entertainers and entertainment companies to
real estate firms to almost every type of business. We typically work with the key individuals (executives and
owners) as well as the businesses themselves.”
By “we”,
we mean the partners, not you. You get to sit in a cubicle and
associate with your fellow cubicle-dwellers. By “exciting
clients”, we usually mean the client’s assistant financial person or
bookkeeper, not the actual client, since why would any client want to
deal with a boring accountant directly when they can afford to pay someone else to do it for
them? Think about it: is a movie star or self-made billionaire actually
going to call you, a new staff person, for tax advice? If you’re lucky
though, you may get to send e-mails to that client’s financial person’s assistant, provided you cc the partner on all e-mails
you send.
“Our growth allows
motivated employees to advance at a rapid pace and offers opportunities
to stretch professionally.”
Virtually
the entire staff turns over every three years at many firms.
Oftentimes, no one
in the history of the firm has ever started as a staff person and
advanced to partner. The most realistic path to advancement usually
involves interviewing with other firms to obtain a better offer, then
taking that offer or using it as a bargaining chip with your current
firm. One common
career path is to start as a staff person at one firm, get hired by a
second firm as a senior, then a third as a manager, and so on up the
ranks to partner.
“Our firm’s profit
margin is at or near the top in the industry.”
One way
these profit margins are achieved is by paying you less.
“Our per partner
profits rival any other CPA firm. Most of our
partners would tell you they make more money today than they ever
expected to in public accounting. This is a very good reason to build
your career at (our firm).”
While the
probability of you ever becoming a partner is under 1% based on
historical attrition rates, you can take comfort in the fact that
the long hours you put in will go towards buying the partners
huge houses they won’t get to enjoy, fancy automobiles to stroke their
egos, therapy for their children who rarely see them, and overpriced divorce lawyers for when their marriages
inevitably break down as a result of neglecting their families for their
careers in the pursuit of more billable hours.
“Working at (our firm)
means working as part of a team, a team of diverse, forward-thinking
professionals constantly striving to deliver fully-integrated client
solutions in an atmosphere of continuous learning.”
Tax return
preparation is not a team sport. You need to be able to work on your
own, figure things out for yourself, train yourself, do professional
reading on your own time, and not bug others with dumb questions. There
is almost nothing forward-thinking about this profession. Primarily we are concerned with
what was done in the prior year and how to follow last year in a way
that minimizes the current year budget. We do not implement
“fully-integrated” solutions to anything, and specialize in missing tax
savings because we are too focused on meeting the budget. When we
aren’t focused just on the prior year, we usually ignore everything
about a transaction or strategy except the tax implications, which is
why we frequently advise clients to unnecessarily spend a dollar in
order to obtain $.40 of tax savings, completely ignoring the fact that
we just cost the client $.60.
“Continual exploration
of new ways to allow individuals to manage their workload and personal
life is key to the success of a culture that respects work-life
flexibility.”
We
accountants tend not to be very flexible people in practice. We
didn’t have a life or career flexibility when we were staff people, so
why should you? We want to have control over you, and we feel more
in control when you are working in the office at least five days a week,
a minimum of eight hours per day. While paperless and Internet
technologies will continue to make the need for a physical office and
fixed work schedules largely obsolete, we don’t feel in
control unless we can physically walk over to your cubicle and harass
you. While we will let you take days off or leave early on occasion,
you need to obtain permission from us before doing so.
“How do you envision
your career? As a series of engaging assignments and challenging
projects that build a satisfying growth path? As an opportunity to do
meaningful work that helps clients solve complex business issues? As a
chance to contribute to your community, build intellectual capital,
and develop marketplace eminence? You can expect to do all of these
things and much more at (our firm)."
As a chance
to “develop marketplace eminence”? I want some of whatever
they’re smoking.
“Before submitting
your resume, be sure to review our
recruitment process and interview
tips pages, or contact the career guidance center at your
university.”
Since
we aren’t really interested in finding out who you are, we’ve developed
these interview tips to instruct you on how to bullshit us during the
interview so you will appear more likely to fit our mold.
“You will be allowed
to perform a specific search in order to see a list of opportunities
that match your requirements and submit your job-specific candidate
profile on-line. Your first profile submission will take approximately
30 minutes.”
Yes
folks, you read that right: it takes 30 minutes for you to submit your
resume with us.
“Your submission will
be reviewed by the recruiting professionals and hiring managers in the
offices where you submitted your interest. It will not be reviewed until
after the submission deadline.”
Your
resume will not initially be reviewed by the people you will be working
with, or even by accountants. Instead it will be reviewed by
people who majored in sociology, communications, medieval literature,
women’s studies or some equally useless subject and were unable to get
jobs in any area other than human resources (and possibly public education or the
IRS).
“You will be contacted
either by a (big firm) professional or your placement office regarding
next steps and scheduling your campus interview should you be selected.”
Someone
wise, I think it was Tom Peters, once said that the typical job
application process will automatically weed out the best 10% of
candidates you could ever get for the job.
So there is clearly a
lot of BS floating out there in the “recruiting process” for most firms.
What should firms do about it? I don’t have a clue,
but if some firm were dumb enough to put me in charge, I might start by telling the truth
for a change.
I bag on the accounting profession a lot
on this site, but overall I think it's a decent career choice. If
I had to do it over again, I would. While there is a lot of crap
to deal with when you start out, in the longer-term you develop some
nice relationships with clients and friendships with the people you work
with who are going through the same things you are; you aren't stuck
doing the same exact thing every day, it's relatively easy to start your
own firm once you've acquired the necessary skills; the work is
sometimes challenging; it pays well; you never have to worry about being
unemployed (death and taxes); for the most part you are doing good
(keeping money away from the government) rather than evil (e.g. divorce
lawyers); you don't have to hire someone else to do your tax return,
your car insurance rates tend to be lower, etc.
There are a lot of positive, albeit
relatively mundane benefits to the accounting profession. Why not
start selling them?
"Come to our firm.
Yes, the overtime sucks and the starting pay isn't great, but if you
stick with us for a few years we'll teach you all the skills you need to
go out on your own and live your life the way you want to."
"Public accounting: At
least we're not selling crack."
Joking aside, I think KPMG is on the right
track with the honesty approach:
"Exactly how heavy is the workload?
Will I be expected to work overtime?"
"We won't mince words
— experience tells us you should expect a significant workload in your
first year, including evenings and some weekends. As your coworkers may
tell you, it's all part of acquiring the skills needed to become a
seasoned professional. There are peak seasons in all practice groups at
KPMG. That is why we have an aggressive 20-30 personal day policy plus
eight firm holidays."
Okay, so two out of the four sentences are
somewhat BS, but for the public accounting industry, that's progress!
Back
to The Roots of All Evil
Seniority
"From each according to his ability, to
each according to his need."
- Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
Here's a not so radical idea:
people should get paid for what they do, not for how long they have been
at a firm.
A typical pyramid scheme lasts for as long
as there are new recruits to keep pouring in money to the people on top.
Eventually a shortage of new recruits develops and the pyramid scheme
collapses.
Most public accounting firms follow a
similar business model. Two or more CPA's start a firm. The
firm grows and admits new partners. The new partners are
compensated partly on the basis of their performance, and partly on
seniority, in effect paying dues to the original partners who have been
there longer. The original partners eventually retire, the first
wave of new partners moves to the top of the pyramid, and the second
wave of new partners starts paying seniority dues to the first wave.
The first wave of new partners becomes a
bit lazy because their compensation is based largely on seniority rather
than performance. They have less incentive to develop new
business, so they don't. The firm stops growing as rapidly.
The second wave of new partners realizes that without a growing practice
it will become difficult for them to recoup the seniority dues they are
paying to the first wave of partners.
The pyramid scheme unravels and the firm
eventually implodes when the second wave of new partners leaves with
their books of business to start their own firms, thereby beginning the
process anew. Of course I'm grossly oversimplifying, but the
general concept is correct, as evidenced by the fact that on an overall
percentage basis, there are very few firms in the history of public
accounting that have survived beyond the third generation of partners.
The firm where I started my career was a
great place to get started in public accounting. The problem was
that the firm's partner compensation structure was based largely on
seniority, and the firm wasn't growing. Once I had learned all the
technical tax knowledge the partners had to offer, there was no
incentive for me to stay. What would have been the point for me to
pay in seniority dues to the existing partners when I wouldn't be able
to recoup those dues because the existing partners were not growing the
business?
In just over a dozen years, another firm I
know went from nothing to becoming the largest CPA firm headquartered in
Los Angeles. The firm determines partner compensation solely on
performance. As a result, the firm is able to recruit all the
young partners from large seniority-based firms. The partners
bring their books of business with them to this firm because they are
able to keep more of the fruits of their labor. It is much easier
for these partners to simply come to this firm (or start their own) than
to argue about the compensation structure with the senior
partners at their existing firms.
The coming retirement wave of the baby
boomers presents an additional challenge to firms who compensate based
on seniority. Overall there will be more CPA's looking to retire
from the business than new CPA's willing and able to buy out those partners.
When supply exceeds demand, the price drops. When the payout
burden to retiring partners exceeds the willingness of younger partners
to fund those retirement payouts, younger partners will simply bolt to
firms that don't have seniority-based compensation time bombs built in
to their business models.
100% performance-based partner
compensation is the future in public accounting. As the saying
goes in Star Trek, "We are the Borg. Lower your shields and power
down your weapons. Your biological and technological
distinctiveness will be added to our own. Resistance is
futile. You will be assimilated."
Back
to The Roots of All Evil
The Gang Rape System
"Minimum security prison is no picnic.
I had a client in there once. He said the trick is: kick someone's
ass the first day, or become somebody's bitch. Then everything
will be alright."
- Rob Newhouse, from the movie
Office Space
So it is with public accounting.
Whenever a new staff person starts working in a firm's tax department, one of
two scenarios usually unfolds during the first year:
Scenario 1: The staff person basically
sucks. They make lots of mistakes and don't learn from them, do
sloppy work, take too long, consistently ask stupid questions, aren't
that pleasant to work with, etc. Partners and managers typically
assign their projects to the good staff people regardless of workload
because they are easier to work with. As a result, the new staff
person who sucks is typically out of work. They send all-user
e-mails out every day or so with the subject. "Do you have any work for
me?", "Need work", etc.
The projects the new staff person does
get are usually the absolute bottom of the barrel projects that nobody
else wants to work on. The staff person does a crappy job on the
crappy projects (who wouldn't?), which further reinforces their image as a crappy staff
person.
Usually within the first year of shoddy
work and daily "Need Work" e-mails, the staff person figures it out and
quits. In cases where they don't figure it out, they get a
lackluster annual review and a miniscule raise, and then if they still
don't figure it out within a couple months after that, the firm
generally
fires them.
Scenario 2: The staff person does at
least a decent job. They get things right by the second or third
attempt, ask semi-intelligent questions, make fewer mistakes as time
goes on, are pleasant to work with, etc. Within a few months, word
gets around that the new staff person is pretty good.
At this point the gang-rape system
kicks in. No matter how many workflow meetings and backlog reports
a firm has, the reality is that partners and managers usually don't
listen to each other when it comes to assigning work to staff. If
the staff person is good, everyone is going to have projects to assign
that staff, and everyone is going to expect that their projects will
have high priority. In the same way that 80% of people consider
themselves to be above-average drivers, most all managers think that
their projects have above-average priority.
From the staff person's perspective,
they are being gang-raped on workflow. They have five partners and
eight managers constantly bugging them about the status of their projects.
The staff person can work lots of overtime and finish all the projects
with a reasonable turnaround time, but doing so will make everyone
happy, which will result in even more work being assigned to the point
that even after working ridiculous amounts of overtime, the work still
won't get done. No good deed goes unpunished.
I propose doing away with the gang-rape
system and replacing it with the bitch system. Under the bitch
system, every staff person who starts at a firm would be subject to the
gang-rape system for the first six months of employment. After six
months, the staff person would choose one or two partners or managers,
and after that point, the staff person (with the partner's consent)
would become that partner's bitch. That partner's work would
always have top priority, and all the other partners and managers would
be made aware of this, subject to an ass-kicking (figuratively) if they
messed with someone else's bitch.
Natural selection being what it is, the
staff people would choose to become the bitches of the best partners or
managers. Under the bitch system, the partners and managers
would have a choice whether or not to accept anyone who requested to be
their bitch, such that the best partners and managers could choose to work
only with the best staff people. In this way, the best staff
people would naturally be paired up with the best partners and managers,
and the worst partners and managers and the worst staff people would end
up stuck together by default.
This is justice. The best
partners, managers and staff people deserve to work together, as do the worst.
Back
to The Roots of All Evil
Timesheet Recaps
“Try this exercise….
Write the very best ad you can, one designed to attract new team
members…. In your ad explain how challenging the position is, how great
the firm is, how wonderful the salary will be. Even throw in that the
firm has a day care center for kids if you like. Then, at the bottom of
the ad, include this note, ‘We ask you to account for every six-minute
period of your time.’ That little phrase says so much about how you
value your people- in short, you don’t!”
- Paul Dunn, from the
book “The Firm of the Future.”
Along with the
timesheet, many firms require their employees to submit a timesheet
recap: a summary of each day’s activity showing time in, time out for
lunch, time back in from lunch, time out at the end of the day, total
hours worked, total billable hours, and total non-billable hours.
I’m not a fan of
hourly billing,
but to the extent that hourly billing is used to price services,
timesheets are a necessary evil. The timesheet recap, however,
serves no such purpose- it implicitly communicates one clear message: we don’t trust you. If a firm
doesn’t trust its employees to be honest about their hours, how in good
conscience can the firm use hourly billing for its customers? What keeps an employee who is determined to fudge timesheets from
fudging the timesheet recap as well?
In addition to wasting
staff members' time, a second person has to be paid to compile and monitor
the data from the timesheet recaps. Customers are billed more, or staff
people are paid less, so that resources can be allocated to fund an
internal timesheet police. More importantly, the recaps are
downright insulting and demoralizing to employees. Since a demoralized
employee who feels micromanaged is more likely to cheat on his timesheet
than a happy employee, timesheet recaps may
encourage the very behavior they were designed to prevent.
The following e-mails,
which were forwarded to me by staff members at various CPA firms,
illustrate the problem (my comments are in red below):
Subject:
Hours last
Monday
Per xxx's request, I
am writing to request that you please estimate the number of billable
and non-billable hours you worked last Monday 1/31. I understand that
the time was released and therefore it was not included in your weekly
report. If possible, xxx would like me to factor those numbers into the
summary prior to your meeting later today.
Please advise.
Why are
you bothering me when you can access this information automatically from
the time and billing software? Why is xxx requesting you to request this
information from me instead of just asking me directly? Doesn't xxx have clients to deal
with instead of wasting my time on workflow meetings? If he's low on
actual work, I can give him some.
Subject:
Weekly Time Summaries
This is just a
reminder pertaining to the weekly time summaries. When a payroll period
overlaps during a week, please print daily summaries for any days for
which the time will have been released when you print your weekly
summaries. You can either hold on to those daily reports and submit them
to me with your weekly summary, or turn them in to me, so that I am able
to factor them into the weekly report.
Huh?
Subject:
Timesheet Recap Revision
You are receiving this
email because your 1/15 timesheet recap is missing the “in/out”
information, as specified in my 12/30 email below. I have highlighted
the applicable paragraph….
Attached is the newly
revised timesheet recap. All professional staff and seniors, and
administrative employees, will need to complete the top portion (“in”,
“out for lunch”, “in from lunch”, “out”) of the recap for each day
worked. Please note that you should be taking a lunch break each day on
which you work more than 6 hours. While firm policy provides for a
1-hour lunch, a 30-minute lunch break is the minimum that should be
taken.
If monitoring the hourly whereabouts
of employees is beneficial, then surely tracking the minute-by-minute
detail would be even more productive:
You are
receiving this email because your timesheet recap is missing the
required bathroom break information, as specified in my email below….
Attached
is the newly revised timesheet recap. All professional staff, seniors
and administrative employees will need to complete the top portion
(“in”, “out for piss break”, “in from piss break”, “out for piss break”,
etc.) of the recap for each day worked. Please note that you should be
taking a piss break each day on which you work more than 6 hours.
While firm policy provides for a 1-minute piss, a 30-second piss is the
minimum that should be taken....
Unfortunately, most
staff people do not become vocal about their frustration with e-mails like
this. They just sit back and take it, quietly letting the
frustration build until eventually they quit. Management never
gets the message.
Recently
promoted partners at the largest accounting firms were asked to rank the
skills necessary to become a partner. According to
the survey, the most important skills in order of importance are: 1)
Interpersonal skills, 2) Leadership, 3) Communication, 4) Practice
development, 5) Technical tax knowledge, and 6) Administrative.
Close
your eyes and picture someone with great interpersonal skills who is a
natural-born leader, communicates well and brings in the business- the
four most important skills per the survey. Is this go-getter the
type of person who is likely to put up with recording every detail of
his or her activities and being micromanaged for
the 10+ years it usually takes to make partner? How many people in
leadership positions do you know who were developed into leaders via
micromanagement?
I've heard
partners at various CPA firms complain about the lack of management talent
in their firms. The firms have lots of people who can follow
detailed instructions, but few who have developed the skills necessary
to deal with clients themselves and handle complex work that doesn't
come with instructions. Many partners are overloaded with
detailed tax return review because they have a shortage of people to
whom they can effectively delegate the review and management functions.
Their employees do a decent job of hitting fastballs, but often
strike out when they are thrown a curve.
Apparently the CPA profession does such a good job of weeding out people
with any sense of initiative, creativity (and perhaps dignity), that
much of what remains are workers capable of blindly following instructions
and prior year workpapers, but not much else. Micromanagement may not offend the
average worker, but it
eventually drives most of the best people out of public accounting
into other fields where they don’t have to put up with it.
Back
to The Roots of All Evil
Workpaper Proliferation
If
Steve Jobs were an accountant, what would his workpapers look like?
Would his files be
monstrosities overflowing with paper?
Would he use hole
reinforcers and metal binding clips just to keep his files from falling
apart?
Would he staple his
workpapers onto legal sheets and then un-staple and re-staple them every
time he needed to add or remove a document?
Would he waste time
manually writing the client name, tax year, schedule title and date on
the top of each workpaper?
Would he be afraid of
paperless technology?
Would he create
automatic footers in Excel so that when someone else subsequently messed
up his spreadsheet the workpaper printed with his initials on it?
Would he use
projection-to-actual reconciliations, extension-to-actual
reconciliations, and projection-to-extension-to-actual reconciliations
that required manual updating every time a change to the tax return was
made?
Would he overlook
major tax issues because he was too focused on workpaper technicalities
to see the bigger picture?
Would he spend time
verifying the accuracy of unnecessary lead-sheets that could have been
eliminated in favor of reviewing directly from the source documents to
the tax return?
Would he create
spreadsheets duplicating information already detailed on the tax return?
Would he reference
every document received from the client during the year regardless of
its relevance to the tax return?
Would his workpapers
contain a plethora of cross-referencing that ended up not tying out to
anything because there were too many references to follow?
Would he create
assignment dockets just to document that nothing was done?
Would he take
seriously an AICPA checklist?
Would he impose so
many workpaper documentation procedures on his tax department that it
took 6 people to do the job that 2 people used to do?
No, Steve Jobs would
do none of these things because fortunately for the world, and
unfortunately for public accounting, Steve Jobs decided not to become an
accountant.
Back
to The Roots of All Evil
Miscellaneous Heresy
Old Dogs,
New Tricks
Innovation has historically been the
almost exclusive domain of the young, and the aging CPA industry is not
innovating. The last truly new service produced by the CPA
profession was the Statement on Standards for Accounting and Review
Services, effective in 1978. All the other new services the
profession has offered are merely extensions of services offered by
others.
Abolishing Performance Appraisals
Performance appraisals impede genuine
feedback, and there's no solid evidence that they motivate people or
lead to meaningful improvement. To the contrary, they are more likely to
destroy human spirit and turn motivated employees into demoralized ones.
The Path to the Dark Side
How big law firms entice law school
graduates to sell their souls for a career in corporate law. Same
type of deal in accounting.
The Case Against Intern Programs
I hesitate to post this since I've
actually worked with a couple great interns, but she's got a point.
Scroll down to #2.
As "Anonymous Lawyer" points out,
a big problem is that "we can't give interns meaningful work because
some of them will prove incompetent. And if the work is
meaningful, then by definition we need to have competent people doing
it." Otherwise we are just babysitters at our clients' expense.
How to Bullshit Potential Employees
"We have the atmosphere of a small firm
with the resources of a large firm; it's the best of both worlds; we
work hard but we play hard; it's all about the people; you'll do great
work everywhere, but it's the people that make the difference; our
success speaks for itself; you won't find a place with more interesting
cases or more challenging work; we strive to maintain an informal
working atmosphere; we know what really matters in life; we're growing
at an unbelievable pace....."
Dumb Interview Questions
Most standard interview
questions are so cliché they might as well be from beauty
pageants where the girls are asked what they want most and
each one responds with "world peace".
Fun With Buzzwords
A collaborative,
synergistic approach to bullshit avoidance utilizing third-generation,
web-enabled initiatives to engender a garbage-free paradigm.
Cool Software
Features We'll Never See
Someone forwarded me this in an
e-mail.....
Strange But True
All-User Emails
Includes classics such as "Should I perm
my hair?" and "Does anyone have any dental floss?"
What Your Clients Really Think
Don't answer questions with "it depends",
don't keep shuffling the staff on my account, don't nickel and dime me
with bills for $100 and charges for phone calls and copies, give me a
package price instead of one based on hours, stop sending me stuff that
doesn't apply to me, don't market to me based on fear, ask me what I
think in person rather than sending me surveys, show me where you're
adding value, make my life easier.
Fun With
Email Disclaimers
Parodies of typical email disclaimers. (No animals were harmed in
the posting of this link).
Timesheet Codes for the Real World
How we really spend our time at work.
Benchmarking, Fear and Keeping Up With the Joneses
The whole point of competition is to
obtain a competitive advantage based on a strategy of differentiation.
You can't achieve that by trying to copy other firms, at least not firms
within your industry. This letter is in response to an article
called "Your
Firm's Score" from a mainstream accounting publication
alleging the wonders of benchmarking.
Death to Multitasking
Most companies will probably continue to
stick their heads in the sand on this one, but the evidence
is clear: multitasking significantly reduces productivity and quality,
creates unnecessary stress, and in the case of e-mail and instant messaging,
appears to
lower IQ even more than smoking pot.
Check out these tips to
prevent e-mail from screwing up your
day. They missed the most obvious ones though: turn off
Microsoft Outlook and set your instant messenger to appear offline.
Is Your Office Killing You?
The modern office is home to as many as
350 different volatile organic chemicals released by building materials,
furnishings and office equipment. Putting in workaholic hours in a
drab cubicle under
fluorescent lights while breathing recycled air and
wearing
uncomfortable office attire is not healthy. We were not designed to spend our lives this way. Not to mention the
fact that billions of dollars are lost each year in reduced productivity
and increased illness as a result of attempting to work in the typical
office environment. Why do we do this to ourselves?
Meetings
The practical alternative to work.
The partners at this one firm I know once devoted almost an entire
partner meeting to debating whether the gum in the break room should be
stored in the packs it came in, or individually unwrapped in order to
prevent people from taking too much gum at one time. For a time
the firm actually paid someone to unwrap the gum into individual sticks.
The Unimportance of Mission Statements
Necessities are not
objectives. Satisfying your customers’ needs, providing a quality work
environment for your employees, and increasing shareholder value are not
missions any more than breathing is a mission for an individual. If the
everyday work environment doesn’t reflect the goals of the business,
the process of hiring consultants, holding committee meetings, and
harassing employees with surveys in order to put a bunch of vague words
on fancy paper and frame it is unlikely to help.
If
you want a mission, pick a client at random, go back to the drawing
board and figure out all the ways you can save that client money that
you haven't been. Next, implement those ideas. Then repeat, client by
client. In the meantime, here's a thought: “Our mission is to stop
wasting company resources on developing mission statements.”
Cubicles
Even the original
designer thinks they may have been a bad idea.
Truths and Trends in Making Partner
Despite the HR hype you hear, the path to
partner in big firms is becoming more difficult: it takes longer than it
used to and the overtime requirements are harsher.
Is Atlas
Shrugging?
Few young people want to become accountants
it seems. At the last CPA conference I went to I was the only guy
under 30, and one of only a few under 40 out of hundreds of people.
It felt like an AARP convention. It may be a seller's market in
the CPA practice market at the moment, but demographics are going to
turn this into a serious buyer's market over the next 10 years as the
aging partners find there are not enough qualified associates to take
over their firms. I'm saving my money.
The Job Cult
Go to school, rack up lots of
debt to pay the tuition, get good grades, participate in
lots of impressive sounding extracurricular activities and
get a diploma from a good school so you can get a good job
with good benefits where you get to spend 40 to 80 hours of
your precious time per week doing something you don't care
about mainly for the sake of fitting in and buying things
you don't need that you must spend all your time working to
pay for. To top it off, the government is going to
take up to 50% of your paycheck. Who's in?
Why Accountants Stay
A survey of accountants says that
nearly 70% would leave their employer. What keeps the other 30%
loyal?
Accountant Jokes
Why did the accountant cross the road?
Because he looked in the file and that's what they did last year.
Demotivators
Consulting: If you're not part of the
solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem.
Ignorance: It's amazing how much easier it is for a team to work
together when no one has any idea where they're going.
Individuality: Always remember that you are unique, just like everybody
else. Laziness: Success is a journey, not a destination, so stop
running. Demotivation: Sometimes the best solution to morale
problems is to just fire all of the unhappy people. Retirement:
Because you've given so much of yourself to the company that you don't
have anything left we can use.
BullshitJob.com
Collection of actual B.S. corporate memos and e-mails.
Need a fancy job title? Check out the
Bullshit Job Title Generator
(inspired by the
Web Economy Bullshit Generator).
Not to be outdone, there is also the
Dilbert Mission Statement Generator
(this one is scary).
The
Non Billable Hour
Revolutionizing law practice one idea at a
time. A lot of great ideas here that also apply to public
accounting.
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