The brain is an organ. The “mind” is the ever evolving process of how we use our brains. To stop spinning your wheels, one must train the mind. First to not get emotional. Second to break down the problem. Third to ask for help succinctly.
A fully matured accountant will proceed through the following when facing an accounting problem: assess the situation, plan, and then act. This may take several reiterations to get all the technical knowledge and extract additional information from the client. An individual still in their metaphorical accounting childhood will jump straight to emotion. One cannot be BOTH emotional AND rational. You gotta pick one.
The first step toward kicking the habit of wheel spinning is to recognize your emotions. Anger, fear, frustration, sadness; these are the first signs that you are about to get axle deep in the soft accounting sand. Take a deep breath. The fight, flight, freeze of the modern day accountant takes many forms… do not get up to get coffee, do not click to something else (like email, articles, or job postings), aka procrastination. Notice if you are mentally berating yourself, your client, or your manager for incompetence. Emotion is your mind trying to inefficiently process the problem. Let’s retrain it.
After recognizing emotions, step two is to figure out exactly what sort of problem you are facing which is accomplished by asking yourself a bunch of questions, generally as many as you can. The problem is generally one of three, and which item you are facing determines 1) how you will ask for help and 2) how much time you should spend:
- Bad or Incomplete Data
- Lack of Sufficient Knowledge/Skills
- Lack of Plan
Bad or Incomplete Data
This is no brainer. You get 5 to 10 minutes to play with bad or incomplete data before asking for help. One cannot turn bad data into good data; you are an accountant, not a magician. Questions to start with are:
- Does this tie to the trial balance (or perhaps a trial balance grouping of accounts)?
- Does the schedule foot? Or crossfoot? (Yes, clients will hard key to make garbage schedules look legit).
- Do the supporting schedules tie to the summary workpaper?
If you get some no’s here, you are likely looking at bad or incomplete data.
Lack of Sufficient Knowledge
This one is the easiest to identify. Say you’ve been assigned to create a fixed asset rollforward. Internally you mutter ‘What the heck is a fixed asset rollforward? I don’t know what I’m doing…’ You need some code, regs, or articles to read. Maybe there’s a template out there for you, or someone to walk you through really quick what you need to do. This is where you might be spending an hour or two and be okay. Just make sure when billing time to note any time you are learning something new (in case someone wants to write it off).
Great questions while you are learning:
- How does this tie to the trial balance?
- How will this tie to the tax return?
- What is the simplest way for someone else to review this work?
- How is this similar to other work I’m doing, or other things I already know?
For instance, lets take UNICAP. You will need to identify all the inventory expense accounts you will analyze to capitalize. You will need to make it easy for the reviewer to see you have grabbed all necessary accounts. Next clearly show the calculations you have performed, so that the workpaper can both tie back to trial balance and tie back to tax return.
Lack of Plan
Sometimes the mess you are handed is so big, you don’t know where to start. Incomplete or Bad Data, yeah, probably, check. Lack of Knowledge/Skills, most definitely. Time to figure out a plan should be about 10 to 20 minutes. If you don’t have a plan by then, maybe ask for help.
As a kid, when you didn’t know what was going on, you asked questions. Like, alot of them. When faced with not knowing the next step, set a timer for 2 minutes, get in touch with your inner child and write down every question (even stupid ones). Then look at your list of questions and group them logically. Then ask some more questions.
What you will find is that all these questions will generate follow up questions that will show you where there is Bad or Incomplete Data, and where there is Lack of Knowledge/Skills. Best of all, you now have a concrete plan (gathering information to answer all these questions).
That leads us to the final and third step, ask for help solving a specific problem. Imagine the difference in how you are perceived between the following requests:
“Can you help me on fixed assets? I’m stuck. I‘ve looked at it for an hour and I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“Can you help me on fixed assets?
- The rollforward the client gave me ties back to the trial balance,
- Rollforward doesn’t crossfoot because the client hard keyed the totals and is off by $13k.
- Additions tab doesn’t tie to the additions column by $32k.
- Client did not send the disposal details.
Can you confirm and let me know whether I should try to fix it or give it back to the client to fix? Thanks!”
Next time you are handed that big, nasty section do the following: skip the emotions, keep your butt in your seat until you have enough questions to figure out what sort of problem you are facing, and then happily go pour yourself that cup of coffee, or have a chat with a co-worker before following plan to action. This is how unflappable accountants are made.
Tax Sophomore 