Behind the Scenes

It is common for startups to be acquired. Acquisitions are rollercoasters of work. They are full of excitement, ups and downs, and sleepless nights. “You can imagine that if one thing goes out of place, the whole process is stalled.”

Small business are powerful, but sometimes they are met with roadblocks only their accountant can meet. When an accountant’s expertise, speed, and experience are needed by a client, they will do will do whatever it takes to provide it. Here’s a story of one accountant who enlisted her team to meet a rapidly approaching deadline after work hours.

It takes a community of great minds coming together to solve great problems. When the Small Business Association released new loans under the CARES act, a community of financial professionals, bankers, and their clients had to come together with their own ideas and perspectives to solve the issue of the Paycheck Protection Program: what to submit.

Some client meetings are simple, and some are analytical deep dives into the operations of a business. During these meetings, key decision makers and their accountants review trends, productivity, and results of their business’ operations. One accountant knew her deep dive with a client was going to take so long that she pre-ordered lunch for everyone.

Good communication is imperative to getting things done. When communication is interrupted by a change, lack of understanding, or a faulty system, it can become harder and harder to find the information you’re looking for. Here is how one accountant ended a a seemingly endless game of Telephone by creating a whole new process for paying bills. 

Most people assume there is a blueprint for the way you do accounting. While math and spreadsheets are almost always involved, sometimes the scope of an accountant’s work goes way beyond that and into identifying relationships, eliminating redundancies, and auditing companies. Solving puzzles like these require accountants to use their thinking caps.

Communicating complicated analysis in a way that is easy to understand is a skill accountants are constantly working on. Being able to translate their complicated processes and findings to an audience that does not understand accounting is a challenge, especially when these findings contradict the existing beliefs of the clients they are speaking to.

Trouble shooting numbers and solving mathematical issues is a large part of an accountant’s job that is often overlooked. Sometimes, the problem lies deeper than the math. Sometimes the problem is in the process followed to find the calculation. One accountant’s problem solving revealed a deeper issue with a client’s process: a lack of understanding

Accountants frequently stay late or work on weekends to meet urgent and important requests from their clients. Due to the nature of these requests, even the smallest task can be so integral to a business’ future that accountants have no choice but to help. Here’s a story of why one accountant paused a family game to send her client some paperwork.

It’s easy to think that accountants spend most of their time behind a computer analyzing data for clients they don’t get to know. What people don’t realize is that accountants spend sometimes years cultivating relationships with their clients. Over the course of five years, one accountants’ professional relationships transformed into a friendship.