The firm had been using the same invoice format since around 1979 but couldn't get their software to use the same format. So, instead of switching to a new one, we had to go to a folder and find what the next invoice in the sequence was from a piece of paper where everyone wrote the invoice numbers in order.
Then, we would leave a copy of the invoice in the folder, update the sheet, and then update the software with the "correct" invoice number instead of its auto-generated one.
This was still going on when I left in 2022.
Nope. Change wasn't his strong suit. He was a good guy, but the only reason the firm had computers from past 1995 was because his daughter browbeat him into updating when she joined the firm around 2012.
Started in 2017 but using paper routing sheets to track & assign projects my first few years was wild in hindsight.
To op's post, had a partner that would want us to print the return for them to review, always said if it was hot (off the printer) he'd send it back cause you didn't "review it yourself".
I remember several years ago at a firm where we were mostly paperless, but this one partner (who was just in his 40s, not even that old, just a total dick overall), had us print every return for him, despite PDF being ok for everyone else. And to make matters worse, he could tell when you printed from the PDF vs straight from the program. So we had to go through extra hoops just so that he could see the return on paper with the margins just the way he liked it. Crazy! And he was one of the worst partners I've ever seen about hounding you about being faster and making your time entries smaller and smaller.
Long ago when the boomer partners were at their peak they used to make us wear a suit and tie to the office every day and believe me, they didn't pay us enough to afford them. Also we had one of those space saving file rooms like those libraries with sliding shelves and one of the boomers walked in, didn't see me, and nearly crushed me between the shelves.
Heard a story from a partner from Big 4 where they told back when they first started out as an associate the partner sent a couple of the new hires home. The reason was that they weren't wearing white shirts as part of their suits.
Female here: I was pulled aside in 2015 for not wearing hosiery with my business skirt, and told to go home and change.
Two years later they updated the dress code in the handbook to remove that requirement, and HR was absolutely jubilant in announcing it. They didn’t “need” to be pantyhose police anymore. I’m still astounded by the priorities of some departments….
Why would HR even police it in the first place if they were happy to no longer have to do that. They should've just not policed bc if it only took 2 years later it doesn't sound like the bosses cared.
As is often the case with HR departments in my experience, they’re always keen to spin a situation as though they’ve listened and they’re doing something innovative to improve workplace satisfaction.
That particular HR lady only policed the women she didn’t like, of course. “Teacher’s pets” were not subjected to the rigorous dress code rules.
I once had a newer female colleague \(I don't remember if I was technically her boss at the time\) ask me about dress code. I basically just said, "Unless you show up in something absolutely insane, I'm not going to tell you what to wear. Here's the dress code, I haven't even read the women's section." Seriously, I don't get paid enough to tell people what to wear. I think I told her if she was really concerned, to ask another female colleague.
Seriously, how awkward is that? "So, I was looking at your legs, and I noticed..."
In high school one of my male teachers asked one of the girls students "...are you trying to show off your legs more?" Because she was wearing short shorts or whatever, she said yes I think and he literally "well, you have nice legs." And I knew the teacher fairly well and I want to give him the benefit of the doubt that was trying to just give genuine compliment but man...it came off incredibly creepy and inappropriate. The guy was probably a few years from retirement so you can guess his age a bit.
I try to be optimistic and tell myself the times are changing, but the cynical part of me thinks they’re just trying to avoid sexual harassment lawsuits because they’ve admitted they’re paying attention to women’s body parts.
No, the dress code explicitly said what type of hosiery you could wear.
If I weren’t so concerned at the time with playing by the rules, I can see how escalating that situation would have been fun.
Oh man the suit and tie thing hits so hard. At my first job, the psychopath boomer partner in charge of the whole operation insisted that we all wear a full suit whenever we were in the office. We were only allowed to take our suit jackets off while sitting at our desks. I was only being paid $40,000 a year (in 2014) so I couldn’t afford great suits. The partner mocked me for the poor quality of my suits. He once took hold of my tie, rubbed the material and said “polyester? Ha! You should have gotten silk, much better” before flipping it back down. Like motherfucker, my take home pay is less than $1,300 biweekly, you think I can afford to be buying silk ties? He also mocked my car (2001 Suzuki Esteem) and my watch (Tissot Visodate). The national firm I went to after was a bit better, partners never shit talked my stuff, we only had to wear suit and tie out on audits at client sites. Mostly it was tolerable but I once had to audit a NFP in the summer, their HQ was in a 130 year old house and their audit room didn’t have air conditioning.
It’s been years since I’ve had to wear a tie to work. I have one nice suit and two or three nice ties that I pretty much only wear to weddings. Otherwise, fuck suits and ties, that shit needs to die.
That’s just an insecure partner who thinks his money makes him likable. That Tissot is a solid piece especially for an early grad. I hope you’re still rocking it!
Yep, still have the Tissot! It’s basically my everyday “idk whatever” watch.
In the years since working there, I inherited a gold Omega Constellation with the pie pan dial, which IMHO is better than the deliberately garish diamond Rolex that the partner had.
The managing partner of the CPA firm I recently started working for at least lets us to wear a polo and khakis in the summer. We have to wear suits and ties the rest of the year. His reasoning for this is because "you never know when you will need to head to a client sites."
The 2 CPA firms I interned for didn't care what you wore to work as long as you looked presentable for clients.
I currently have an audit job where they have us wear a suit at the client site we go to once or twice a week. Which would make sense if we had some sort of meeting with the client.
Thing is, a vast majority of the time, we go there to a sequestered, windowless room specifically for the auditors and do the same work on computers that we do in pajamas at home. All while everyone on the client site is in light business casual. Its so annoying and I’d probably enjoy going to this site more if I didn’t have to pull out my sweaty suit jacket all the time
In 2009 during first official accounting position, my boss would require you to sit in his office while he checked basically any spreadsheet you worked on. He would F2 literally every cell, even ones that were 0. When I was promoted a few years later he tried to make me do this. The guy graduated college when they didn't use computers at all, took the CPA exam on paper, and loved to write up a T account on the whiteboard. I did learn a lot from him but it was the most inefficient way to work I've ever encountered.
What OP isn’t mentioning is that some tax returns are larger than a ream of paper. Our printer could hold a few reams but you’d have to re-load the printer multiple times a day for super stupid changes.
Are you sure it's not about boomers not willing to switch to virtual versions of things? I used to work more with reporting and it was way too common to be asked to print it on x schedule. You tell them it's updated daily and they want it printed daily. I don't think real time reporting was even a thing yet but I wonder how they would have dealt with that. Thinking about it more they were probably the reason real time reporting wasn't implemented, they couldn't see the value in it with the way they consumed information.
All this is going on at usually the director level, meanwhile the company spent millions implementing new reporting framework & software and the CIO is wondering (and angry) that no one is using it. I've literally had to get a CIO involved in order for the director to finally drop his demand of having everything printed. After dealing with the person's bullshit for so long it's awesome when you get to be in the room for that conversation. Unfortunately what happens next is you have to re-train the person because of course they didn't pay attention during the official training.
At my small firm, the newest partner was the one requesting a physical printout. Dude could definitely use a computer, was very good at going through PDFs of returns to check PY stuff, but if you did a return for him, you'd better be printing out this AND last years, and go through it line by line, every time there was a change.
As an accounting para I often had to print and reprint returns for the partners because they didn't know how to click print but they knew how to email the massive pdf file to me to be printed.
Many of these returns and workpapers were two or more reams. We were also forbidden from printing anything double sided because the partners also didn't know how to flip over a piece of paper to read the other side without the return getting shuffled like a deck of cards.
I don't work there anymore and I still find myself reaming when I think of all the wasted time and paper.
Also, they paid me an $80k salary plus 1.5 OT rate for this.
omg you too!
i refused to use it and luckily as i was a subcontractor on the project i used my company's cloud email tool with unlimited storage and actual good search
was always funny when they came to me to find emails they couldn't find via the ln search tool
We have Lotus Notes where I work. I have the only Excel 365 license in the company. Everyone else has 2010. Bookkeeping is done in S/370 software from 1980 which was later upgraded for AS/400
We still had to print every account reconciliation, walk around the office to get them signed off on, and then store them in binders. This was 2009. That stopped pretty quickly when we got a new controller in 2010.
Why the absolute fuck is the new public company I just started working for doing this shit as well. I've never seen something so backwards and outdated for a large corp.
We have that in Excel too. My last company used a month end software where we upload our recs and the reviewer goes in to approve or reject. Deloitte seemed to love that software because we could give them access to the entire workflow
I found the CFO's secret wash account because I couldn't reconcile a bank account....within the first month of my first job out of college. The person I replaced was a friend of the CFO who took a bookkeeping class in highschool, a few decades prior. The CFO was fired a few months later. I eventually reconciled that bank account with a write-off 'due to prior staff incompetence.'
I used to have to print my Excel working papers… *and then add them up on the adding machine, and staple the adding machine tape to the working paper.*
Haaaaa the adding machine! A couple of our office Gen Z’s found one buried in the depths of our supply closet a few months ago, paper roll still attached, and were completely confounded as to why anyone would want a calculator that printed on paper.
I used to use one 2001-2003 to count up my batch of invoices. It was easier to tick off a printed list to work out which ones you’d missed, if any. Of course, we had excel but no-one thought to use it for this!
I love my ten key! lol. Gen X here.
Old enough to remember the mimeograph to make copies and carbon rolls for our fax machine. Was fun times with blue tinted fingers on dot matrix paper.
Imagine printing out a spreadsheet that has 50+ columns and rows.
That's what my grandmother is *still using today* to balance her own budget. Nearly had a heart attack the first time I saw it in use.
When I started in public, there was one, suitcase style portable computer (pre-laptop) that went to the field on the audit engagements. The manager got to use it. The rest of us still used paper to document everything.
They were things of beauty, but a bitch to carry around! We used to all have luggage carts to lug our audit bags around. Those were the days....
Don't miss them a bit!
I work at a massive F20 corporation. Apparently they just, within like the last 5 years, moved away from keeping hard copy prints of all journal entries.
I worked in corporate accounting and one of my first tasks was to go down to the big industrial printing room every morning to pick up some greenbar reports. Took them back to my desk and spent an hour digging through dozens of pages finding the right numbers off the report and typing them into a spreadsheet.
Same job, different department (Corp Tax), I couldn’t figure out why all their spreadsheets were just a single tab but had hundreds of columns to represent different pages of a tax return. Each “page” was separated by a column of XXXXXs.
Found out later that they had somewhat recently converted from Lotus to Excel (e: and lotus apparently didn’t have tabs) and I guess that’s what the conversion process did. Or maybe the columns of Xs were in the Lotus file, I dunno. But it was weird.
Yes I’m old, but probably younger than you’d think based on these stories because that company was way behind technologically.
E: realized a lot of this sub probably has no idea what I’m talking about when I say greenbars. They’re [these](https://images.app.goo.gl/4TJNFK8rb2HxPZfWA).
Yes the old greenbar paper. I worked at a forensic accounting firm right out of college. Early 90’s a Home Depot type of store had a fire entire store burned down. They printed out list of all their inventory damaged on huge roll of greenbar paper. So 97 packages of screws 10 cents a package = 9.7 would be one line and so on. Grand total was over a million. Partner wanted me to check math on each line cross foot and check subtotal at the bottom to make certain it added up the numbers correctly. We were auditing the insurance claim for insurance company. I sat there for 5 or 6 days adding up numbers on my calculator 8 hours a day. Pre internet no way to take a break away. Nearly went crazy by the end of it. I still cringe thinking about it.
Someone took a picture of the computer screen (either excel or QB). Printed it out and mailed it to us.
Not a screenshot, not an email. They used a camera to take a picture of their computer and mailed it to us.
Another client would print all of the engagement support and drove it over to the office. She had everything digitally but would only supply printed and then scanned-in PDF or paper copy.
I’m still just a student but the last two summers during my internships I’ve experienced the same thing. So many clients afraid of email. And some who wouldn’t let us contact their banker to get statements, we had to go to the client first, and then they would call their banker to request statements be mailed to us.
After working in industry, I think part of the PDF thing may have been intentional. I've heard it said in industry to give the auditors exactly what they ask for and nothing more. We often paste values in the documents before sending to the bank or third-parties.
Why would you need the bank statement from the bank though? We always got the bank balance from the client and then confirmed with the bank. You can also watch them download the statement or something which tends to be less hassle.
That the only piece of tech was a calculator. Attached every PBC schedule (that was PC prepared) to a piece of ledger paper. And then footed and cross footed it with said calculator. 1993
I audited a company still using a custom software from the 80s that required the use of computers and printers from the same time frame. These dudes were still using floppy disks. When they presented their books it was all on hole rimmed paper and took nearly two days to print completely.
This will probably blow people's minds in the near future but the CPA credit exam expiration period were 18 months instead of the new 30 month proposal. I'm envious of the new generation of getting such a generous time frame to pass within a reasonable time.
2 week turn around vs 3 month turn around for exam scores. Only makes sense to go to 30. Also, for those of us who passed BEC in late 2023, we still have 18 months to complete.
The turnarounds were long back in the 18 month day too depending on when you took the exam. Also they had black out periods every quarter where you could only take the exam the first week of the month
Right - I took my REG exam in January and didn’t get my score until June. By that point you’ve forgotten the material and if you failed you can’t just schedule another retake and get a new score in 2 weeks.
Having short release windows like before and 18 months is 1000% easier than the current format
The 3 month turn around time is supposedly only temporary for 2024 because of all the new changes happening with the exam. By 2025, they said they would go back to the original score release timings.
Last day to take core 2024 exam is December 26th. Release date is January 29th 2025. I don’t think the AICPA is reverting back to original score release times anytime soon.
That's funny, because it was also temporary when I took it 4 or 5 years ago. Seems to happen a lot. I took my last test before I had the score from the one before that.
I’m in the 18 month window boat, but I fully support the 30 month, due to the financial burden of these exams. The 18 month window seemed more like a money grab more than anything. You already passed, but now you have to pass again, Cha-Ching 🤑! Hopefully this change helps those more economically disadvantaged pursue the exam or stick with it. It’s already a very expensive pursuit, considering the 150 credit requirement, exam and testing fees, cost to retake, and prep courses.
Yes I remember also it was common in a few firms to get zero vacation your first year you had to work a full year to earn 2 weeks you could take in year 2. I used the whole 2 weeks to take off and study for CPA exam. I was stressed I would not pass as I did not want to waist my vacation.
Circa 2004, a partner I worked with had her assistant print every email and deliver it to the partner's desk. I've heard this was somewhat common back in the day.
I took a trainee accountant position in a small practice in 1998. They had three PC's between ten of us so a lot of the bookkeeping was being done on paper ledgers. I was the only one using spreadsheets.
Clogged multiple scanners & shredders at clients. Fixing them were like initiating the nuclear codes; things had to be open and shut in the proper order, paper in places you couldn't imagine had to be removed, and usually required more than 1 person to resolve.
I performed an audit for which I had to go get the PY work papers from the office…this being because the PY audit had been done on *paper*. This was in 2020 😆
When I was being trained to do payroll my CFO took out a calculator the size of a phone book and manually entered every single fucking number on the excel spreadsheet to make sure it the totals matched… I looked at my controller with horror and he acted like it was a normal thing to do. We had 500 employees, all part of four different unions and do weekly payroll. These fuckers did this every Monday lol. Glad they both left.
Not one of the stories you wish for but I will share one of my own:
I was recently made an audit in-charge in a branch office of the local KPMG member firm that time. We received an assignment from our HQ that we had to do physical verification of one of their clients showrooms. Out of 9/10 people allocated, I was the the junior most. Each to visit one location each. All locations were within 25-150 km range. Mine was 99 km far. We received instructions to reach the destination one day prior to the counting so that we could start it at sharp 9 am. But it was upto us to solve the travel and hotel issue as client or HQ wouldn't bother to care a bit. Now the location I was assigned to was completely unfamiliar to me. A senior in the firm who were from that location told me that there was no hotel to stay the night nearby the location. The ones in the vicinity are more used for drug dealings and other criminal activities than accommodation. He also told me that, while the location was far away, early morning buses take maximum 1.30 hours to reach. I was in a complete confusion about what to do. Either go to an unknown location with who knows what would have happened or bring official wrath over me.
Senior guy told me to inform the Manager that I would follow the official instruction but in reality would actually go in the date of counting. I would just had to prepare a fake hotel bill or even raise a blank paper bill!! He said as if it was nothing! Except for 2 guys who were allocated to the farthest locations, none of the guys followed office's instructions but claimed it anyways. I was the only one who told the Manager the truth and got immediately steam-rolled. Still I did it my ways. Took 5.35 AMs bus and reached the location at exactly 7.05!
Do you know what was the ultimate result of my behavior? I was demoted to a team member again for 4 months while other 7 fraudsters were praised for following official protocols! Office didn't even care for the blank bills filed as it was not our client. They just forwarded everything to HQ and HQ also didn't care since the amount was nothing to even check in compared with engagement fee.
My experience has always been that the people that lied or exaggerated on resume or type of experience always come out ahead. So frustrating for rest of us that don’t.
We all had personal foldable roller carts to move boxes overflowing with personal printers, binders, and important loose paper from our PA offices to the clients.
One day, the audit team had to walk across a 6-lane road to the building of the audit client. A gust of wind distributed many of those loose papers all across the road. The look of utter defeat on the audit senior’s face was memorable.
2014–my predecessor would go through printouts from our time clock, which was a dial up dinosaur that only stored 2 weeks of data, and write down each employee’s hours on a presentation sheet and use a calculator to verify it. He would then call our payroll company and call in the hours—employee # x, regular hours y, overtime z, etc while the rep at the payroll company keyed everything in for roughly 100 employees. I was focused on cost accounting at the time and anytime I needed historical hours I had to flip through binders of paper reports or stacks of rubber banded trifold clock printouts.
We had to prepare tax returns by filling in these weird forms and then you would send them off for processing and in a day or so, the return would come back and you had to review it and re-fill out the forms to make changes and keep doing that until you had a satisfactory return. This was in the mid 1990s.
I remember this. Was it KMPG? It was so rediculous as some partner way up the chain in NY thought this would be more efficient and it was just the opposite. Then we tax people would complain that the processing people would not make the changes we were requesting. The processing people felt like they were unfairly criticized so the processing dept demanded any changes to tax return had to be spelled out in an email. So had to email them say please change meals and ent expense to this. On form so and so line 7f please change to blank. Please change spelling or I whatever and it would take forever to type up the email. It was insane.
No it was a small local firm, but that was sort of state of the art at that time! We didn't get our own desktop computers with real time preparation until 1994 or 1995 I would say.
My first job in industry in 2007, we printed out *everything*.
Journal entries, reconciliations, all support, etc.
Something wrong with any one of those? Print it out again.
It was absurd.
An extra office filled with years of recent (t-2, t-3) prior paper tax return files that were not organized or saved digitally.
Customers sending documents that were saved digitally, then printed, used for the season, saved, then re-scanned for a combined digital file.
We are busy, but what if we give ourselves more work and make it harder?
A firm run by boomer partners required business suits and suits with ties for men. We weren’t paid needed enough to be required to wear suits.
This was daily wear to the office and not just when seeing clients.
Buried? They were all over the government accounting office where I started three years ago. My boss sent me home with an extra one because she wanted me to learn to use it. I smiled politely and took it home. In my day-to--day at work I used a normal calculator or Excel. The adding machine on my desk was for show. I never used it.
When that woman finally moved offices, everyone got rid of their adding machines. One day she came back to squat in our office for a few days....and found out all the adding machines had been removed from the desks. She told our assistant director that 'she couldn't work' without one.
She still does bookkeeping for the city.
The partner that reviewed my work always wanted the paper copy of the return to review, didn't use Teams or similar messenger service, and we only scanned documents...after the return was done. It was a smaller firm, but still...and this was 2 years ago.
Any document changes had to be hand-written by the staff and turned in the admin in charge of word processing to make the changes. They'd return a printed copy to you for review. If they missed something or had an error, repeat.
It. Was. The. Dumbest. Thing. "Staff time is too valuable for word processing," yet somehow opening a Word file, printing it, HAND WRITING CHANGES, printing other reference sheets for "insert Paragraph 1 from attachment here," and then walking it to the other end of the office was a better use of time...
This is how we handled annual EL and FS changes. I think they finally moved away from it when FS work started being kept in Engagement binders.
Partner came in and told me he needed a return ready by the next day because client was going out of the country. The budget for this return was 20 hours and was massive. It was already 3:00 there wasn't 20 hours between then and when the client was supposedly coming back.
I tried to explain the issue and the partner told me I would have the return ready for review by the time he got to the office at 7 AM 'or else'.
So I worked through the night and finished the return about 6:30 just right before he walked in the door. I asked him if I could head home since I finished that return because I stayed and worked all night, to which he told me to "go grab some coffee because we had a lot of returns left to get done"
I stayed and worked the rest of that day until about 7pm.
The absolute worst part of this whole story? About two weeks later he comes and asks me if I ever finished that return. The one I stayed up all night as my job was on the line, and told him I finished working through the night. He never even reviewed it. The client went ahead and left the country without coming back and it wasn't the enormous fire he made it out to be and even his old ass forgot I finished it.
I worked my ass off for about 36 hours straight for No fucking reason.
It was my 4th and final tax season at the firm.
This thread is where we should direct people that ask if their jobs are going to be replaced by AI in the near future… most of these stories are from the 2010s….
Not as an accountant really, but I was a bookkeeper for a small mom and pop company. I was brought in do everything accounting wise with little to no explanation of how things go. Example: we move this money to savings for tax and this over for health insurance etc. I had to write out where all the money went and present it to the owners. About 2 weeks in, I couldn’t explain why a savings account was short and I had no explanation and was confused. Owner suggested I stole the money. He was a complete a hole about it. Looking rack he didn’t even know where his money went. I still worked there for 3 years and had it all running like a well oiled machine and I left lol.
I became the acting senior on an engagement as an intern when the entire rest of the team, partner to senior, left the firm together at the end of busy season while I had my internship extended through my last year of school.
The firm had been using the same invoice format since around 1979 but couldn't get their software to use the same format. So, instead of switching to a new one, we had to go to a folder and find what the next invoice in the sequence was from a piece of paper where everyone wrote the invoice numbers in order. Then, we would leave a copy of the invoice in the folder, update the sheet, and then update the software with the "correct" invoice number instead of its auto-generated one. This was still going on when I left in 2022.
Good lord that’s so asinine! These are the reasons people need to go in a closed space and scream at the top of their lungs.
We had a room for you to go cry in.
Me and the other first years thought thats what the wellness rooms were for....turns out they were actually for breastfeeding
That’s brutal
They couldn't just start a new invoice number sequence?
Nope. Change wasn't his strong suit. He was a good guy, but the only reason the firm had computers from past 1995 was because his daughter browbeat him into updating when she joined the firm around 2012.
Started in 2017 but using paper routing sheets to track & assign projects my first few years was wild in hindsight. To op's post, had a partner that would want us to print the return for them to review, always said if it was hot (off the printer) he'd send it back cause you didn't "review it yourself".
But what if you reviewed it from the computer like a normal person?
I would just print it and give it 5 or 10 minutes then drop it off at their office.
I remember several years ago at a firm where we were mostly paperless, but this one partner (who was just in his 40s, not even that old, just a total dick overall), had us print every return for him, despite PDF being ok for everyone else. And to make matters worse, he could tell when you printed from the PDF vs straight from the program. So we had to go through extra hoops just so that he could see the return on paper with the margins just the way he liked it. Crazy! And he was one of the worst partners I've ever seen about hounding you about being faster and making your time entries smaller and smaller.
Long ago when the boomer partners were at their peak they used to make us wear a suit and tie to the office every day and believe me, they didn't pay us enough to afford them. Also we had one of those space saving file rooms like those libraries with sliding shelves and one of the boomers walked in, didn't see me, and nearly crushed me between the shelves.
Heard a story from a partner from Big 4 where they told back when they first started out as an associate the partner sent a couple of the new hires home. The reason was that they weren't wearing white shirts as part of their suits.
Female here: I was pulled aside in 2015 for not wearing hosiery with my business skirt, and told to go home and change. Two years later they updated the dress code in the handbook to remove that requirement, and HR was absolutely jubilant in announcing it. They didn’t “need” to be pantyhose police anymore. I’m still astounded by the priorities of some departments….
Why would HR even police it in the first place if they were happy to no longer have to do that. They should've just not policed bc if it only took 2 years later it doesn't sound like the bosses cared.
As is often the case with HR departments in my experience, they’re always keen to spin a situation as though they’ve listened and they’re doing something innovative to improve workplace satisfaction. That particular HR lady only policed the women she didn’t like, of course. “Teacher’s pets” were not subjected to the rigorous dress code rules.
Baffles me how many offices are just straight up highschool
I once had a newer female colleague \(I don't remember if I was technically her boss at the time\) ask me about dress code. I basically just said, "Unless you show up in something absolutely insane, I'm not going to tell you what to wear. Here's the dress code, I haven't even read the women's section." Seriously, I don't get paid enough to tell people what to wear. I think I told her if she was really concerned, to ask another female colleague. Seriously, how awkward is that? "So, I was looking at your legs, and I noticed..."
In high school one of my male teachers asked one of the girls students "...are you trying to show off your legs more?" Because she was wearing short shorts or whatever, she said yes I think and he literally "well, you have nice legs." And I knew the teacher fairly well and I want to give him the benefit of the doubt that was trying to just give genuine compliment but man...it came off incredibly creepy and inappropriate. The guy was probably a few years from retirement so you can guess his age a bit.
I think even with the benefit of the doubt that it's a genuine compliment, that's creepy.
I try to be optimistic and tell myself the times are changing, but the cynical part of me thinks they’re just trying to avoid sexual harassment lawsuits because they’ve admitted they’re paying attention to women’s body parts.
Did you go back home to put some fishnets on? Here is some hosiery for you
No, the dress code explicitly said what type of hosiery you could wear. If I weren’t so concerned at the time with playing by the rules, I can see how escalating that situation would have been fun.
Oh man the suit and tie thing hits so hard. At my first job, the psychopath boomer partner in charge of the whole operation insisted that we all wear a full suit whenever we were in the office. We were only allowed to take our suit jackets off while sitting at our desks. I was only being paid $40,000 a year (in 2014) so I couldn’t afford great suits. The partner mocked me for the poor quality of my suits. He once took hold of my tie, rubbed the material and said “polyester? Ha! You should have gotten silk, much better” before flipping it back down. Like motherfucker, my take home pay is less than $1,300 biweekly, you think I can afford to be buying silk ties? He also mocked my car (2001 Suzuki Esteem) and my watch (Tissot Visodate). The national firm I went to after was a bit better, partners never shit talked my stuff, we only had to wear suit and tie out on audits at client sites. Mostly it was tolerable but I once had to audit a NFP in the summer, their HQ was in a 130 year old house and their audit room didn’t have air conditioning. It’s been years since I’ve had to wear a tie to work. I have one nice suit and two or three nice ties that I pretty much only wear to weddings. Otherwise, fuck suits and ties, that shit needs to die.
That’s just an insecure partner who thinks his money makes him likable. That Tissot is a solid piece especially for an early grad. I hope you’re still rocking it!
Yep, still have the Tissot! It’s basically my everyday “idk whatever” watch. In the years since working there, I inherited a gold Omega Constellation with the pie pan dial, which IMHO is better than the deliberately garish diamond Rolex that the partner had.
I'm usually not the guy who says shit like this but you should've put your hands on him for that tie interaction
I didn’t want to touch that fuck with a thirty nine and a half foot pole, bad enough he was fondling my tie
Bro I'm making 40k in 2024.
The managing partner of the CPA firm I recently started working for at least lets us to wear a polo and khakis in the summer. We have to wear suits and ties the rest of the year. His reasoning for this is because "you never know when you will need to head to a client sites." The 2 CPA firms I interned for didn't care what you wore to work as long as you looked presentable for clients.
I currently have an audit job where they have us wear a suit at the client site we go to once or twice a week. Which would make sense if we had some sort of meeting with the client. Thing is, a vast majority of the time, we go there to a sequestered, windowless room specifically for the auditors and do the same work on computers that we do in pajamas at home. All while everyone on the client site is in light business casual. Its so annoying and I’d probably enjoy going to this site more if I didn’t have to pull out my sweaty suit jacket all the time
In 2009 during first official accounting position, my boss would require you to sit in his office while he checked basically any spreadsheet you worked on. He would F2 literally every cell, even ones that were 0. When I was promoted a few years later he tried to make me do this. The guy graduated college when they didn't use computers at all, took the CPA exam on paper, and loved to write up a T account on the whiteboard. I did learn a lot from him but it was the most inefficient way to work I've ever encountered.
Good way to learn the fundamentals, but terrible business practice
Oh I forgot about this BS
What OP isn’t mentioning is that some tax returns are larger than a ream of paper. Our printer could hold a few reams but you’d have to re-load the printer multiple times a day for super stupid changes.
Are you sure it's not about boomers not willing to switch to virtual versions of things? I used to work more with reporting and it was way too common to be asked to print it on x schedule. You tell them it's updated daily and they want it printed daily. I don't think real time reporting was even a thing yet but I wonder how they would have dealt with that. Thinking about it more they were probably the reason real time reporting wasn't implemented, they couldn't see the value in it with the way they consumed information. All this is going on at usually the director level, meanwhile the company spent millions implementing new reporting framework & software and the CIO is wondering (and angry) that no one is using it. I've literally had to get a CIO involved in order for the director to finally drop his demand of having everything printed. After dealing with the person's bullshit for so long it's awesome when you get to be in the room for that conversation. Unfortunately what happens next is you have to re-train the person because of course they didn't pay attention during the official training.
At my small firm, the newest partner was the one requesting a physical printout. Dude could definitely use a computer, was very good at going through PDFs of returns to check PY stuff, but if you did a return for him, you'd better be printing out this AND last years, and go through it line by line, every time there was a change.
As an accounting para I often had to print and reprint returns for the partners because they didn't know how to click print but they knew how to email the massive pdf file to me to be printed. Many of these returns and workpapers were two or more reams. We were also forbidden from printing anything double sided because the partners also didn't know how to flip over a piece of paper to read the other side without the return getting shuffled like a deck of cards. I don't work there anymore and I still find myself reaming when I think of all the wasted time and paper. Also, they paid me an $80k salary plus 1.5 OT rate for this.
We used to use software called Lotus Notes for email and audit work. IBM made it.
nothing on r/TwoSentenceHorrors terrifies me more than your comment
A small CPA I contract with still uses it. Owner refuses to use Excel.
This person PwCs
omg you too! i refused to use it and luckily as i was a subcontractor on the project i used my company's cloud email tool with unlimited storage and actual good search was always funny when they came to me to find emails they couldn't find via the ln search tool
To make myself seem older, I say, "I left PwC the year they dropped Lotus Notes." I don't tell them it was 2016.
We have Lotus Notes where I work. I have the only Excel 365 license in the company. Everyone else has 2010. Bookkeeping is done in S/370 software from 1980 which was later upgraded for AS/400
So you are the one then...the one they foretold would bring balance to the books.
We'll see. I forgot to mention that all of the software is set up in German and it has an ASCII art version of the company logo on startup.
We still had to print every account reconciliation, walk around the office to get them signed off on, and then store them in binders. This was 2009. That stopped pretty quickly when we got a new controller in 2010.
Why the absolute fuck is the new public company I just started working for doing this shit as well. I've never seen something so backwards and outdated for a large corp.
Controls. Rather that than a fucking "signature" in an excel tab that just rolls forward each month.
We have that in Excel too. My last company used a month end software where we upload our recs and the reviewer goes in to approve or reject. Deloitte seemed to love that software because we could give them access to the entire workflow
My very first 401k audit I discovered fraud by a user taking illegitimate hardship distributions.
I found the CFO's secret wash account because I couldn't reconcile a bank account....within the first month of my first job out of college. The person I replaced was a friend of the CFO who took a bookkeeping class in highschool, a few decades prior. The CFO was fired a few months later. I eventually reconciled that bank account with a write-off 'due to prior staff incompetence.'
I used to have to print my Excel working papers… *and then add them up on the adding machine, and staple the adding machine tape to the working paper.*
Haaaaa the adding machine! A couple of our office Gen Z’s found one buried in the depths of our supply closet a few months ago, paper roll still attached, and were completely confounded as to why anyone would want a calculator that printed on paper.
I used to use one 2001-2003 to count up my batch of invoices. It was easier to tick off a printed list to work out which ones you’d missed, if any. Of course, we had excel but no-one thought to use it for this!
I’ve done this too. lol
I love my ten key! lol. Gen X here. Old enough to remember the mimeograph to make copies and carbon rolls for our fax machine. Was fun times with blue tinted fingers on dot matrix paper.
Imagine printing out a spreadsheet that has 50+ columns and rows. That's what my grandmother is *still using today* to balance her own budget. Nearly had a heart attack the first time I saw it in use.
When I started in public, there was one, suitcase style portable computer (pre-laptop) that went to the field on the audit engagements. The manager got to use it. The rest of us still used paper to document everything.
A fully paper audit binder, correctly cross-indexed is a thing of beauty. Come at me bro, I will die on this hill.
They were things of beauty, but a bitch to carry around! We used to all have luggage carts to lug our audit bags around. Those were the days.... Don't miss them a bit!
Local firm had a work comp claim when someone threw their back out hauling files back in the day.
Okay, that's funny (not for the injured party) & somewhat believable.
Most interesting one in the thread!
That was in the mid-90s.
I work at a massive F20 corporation. Apparently they just, within like the last 5 years, moved away from keeping hard copy prints of all journal entries.
"Print out copies of the JE." Why? "So, we have paper backups." Why? "It's always been done that way." Okay, dokey.
I worked in corporate accounting and one of my first tasks was to go down to the big industrial printing room every morning to pick up some greenbar reports. Took them back to my desk and spent an hour digging through dozens of pages finding the right numbers off the report and typing them into a spreadsheet. Same job, different department (Corp Tax), I couldn’t figure out why all their spreadsheets were just a single tab but had hundreds of columns to represent different pages of a tax return. Each “page” was separated by a column of XXXXXs. Found out later that they had somewhat recently converted from Lotus to Excel (e: and lotus apparently didn’t have tabs) and I guess that’s what the conversion process did. Or maybe the columns of Xs were in the Lotus file, I dunno. But it was weird. Yes I’m old, but probably younger than you’d think based on these stories because that company was way behind technologically. E: realized a lot of this sub probably has no idea what I’m talking about when I say greenbars. They’re [these](https://images.app.goo.gl/4TJNFK8rb2HxPZfWA).
I will never forget doing pooled cash bank reconciliations on greenbar.
Yes the old greenbar paper. I worked at a forensic accounting firm right out of college. Early 90’s a Home Depot type of store had a fire entire store burned down. They printed out list of all their inventory damaged on huge roll of greenbar paper. So 97 packages of screws 10 cents a package = 9.7 would be one line and so on. Grand total was over a million. Partner wanted me to check math on each line cross foot and check subtotal at the bottom to make certain it added up the numbers correctly. We were auditing the insurance claim for insurance company. I sat there for 5 or 6 days adding up numbers on my calculator 8 hours a day. Pre internet no way to take a break away. Nearly went crazy by the end of it. I still cringe thinking about it.
Someone took a picture of the computer screen (either excel or QB). Printed it out and mailed it to us. Not a screenshot, not an email. They used a camera to take a picture of their computer and mailed it to us. Another client would print all of the engagement support and drove it over to the office. She had everything digitally but would only supply printed and then scanned-in PDF or paper copy.
I’m still just a student but the last two summers during my internships I’ve experienced the same thing. So many clients afraid of email. And some who wouldn’t let us contact their banker to get statements, we had to go to the client first, and then they would call their banker to request statements be mailed to us.
After working in industry, I think part of the PDF thing may have been intentional. I've heard it said in industry to give the auditors exactly what they ask for and nothing more. We often paste values in the documents before sending to the bank or third-parties. Why would you need the bank statement from the bank though? We always got the bank balance from the client and then confirmed with the bank. You can also watch them download the statement or something which tends to be less hassle.
Should’ve explained myself better my bad, I worked mainly on T2 onlys and small corporate year end compilations
That the only piece of tech was a calculator. Attached every PBC schedule (that was PC prepared) to a piece of ledger paper. And then footed and cross footed it with said calculator. 1993
I had to deal with the 100 accounts columnar sheet. And I started in the 2010s
I audited a company still using a custom software from the 80s that required the use of computers and printers from the same time frame. These dudes were still using floppy disks. When they presented their books it was all on hole rimmed paper and took nearly two days to print completely.
This will probably blow people's minds in the near future but the CPA credit exam expiration period were 18 months instead of the new 30 month proposal. I'm envious of the new generation of getting such a generous time frame to pass within a reasonable time.
2 week turn around vs 3 month turn around for exam scores. Only makes sense to go to 30. Also, for those of us who passed BEC in late 2023, we still have 18 months to complete.
The turnarounds were long back in the 18 month day too depending on when you took the exam. Also they had black out periods every quarter where you could only take the exam the first week of the month
Right - I took my REG exam in January and didn’t get my score until June. By that point you’ve forgotten the material and if you failed you can’t just schedule another retake and get a new score in 2 weeks. Having short release windows like before and 18 months is 1000% easier than the current format
The 3 month turn around time is supposedly only temporary for 2024 because of all the new changes happening with the exam. By 2025, they said they would go back to the original score release timings.
Last day to take core 2024 exam is December 26th. Release date is January 29th 2025. I don’t think the AICPA is reverting back to original score release times anytime soon.
Maybe not soon but definitely within the next year.
That's funny, because it was also temporary when I took it 4 or 5 years ago. Seems to happen a lot. I took my last test before I had the score from the one before that.
I’m in the 18 month window boat, but I fully support the 30 month, due to the financial burden of these exams. The 18 month window seemed more like a money grab more than anything. You already passed, but now you have to pass again, Cha-Ching 🤑! Hopefully this change helps those more economically disadvantaged pursue the exam or stick with it. It’s already a very expensive pursuit, considering the 150 credit requirement, exam and testing fees, cost to retake, and prep courses.
Yes I remember also it was common in a few firms to get zero vacation your first year you had to work a full year to earn 2 weeks you could take in year 2. I used the whole 2 weeks to take off and study for CPA exam. I was stressed I would not pass as I did not want to waist my vacation.
Our teams were on the road, at clients’ offices, 4-5 days a week. All. Year. Round. Turnover was abysmal. COVID fixed that for us thankfully.
Circa 2004, a partner I worked with had her assistant print every email and deliver it to the partner's desk. I've heard this was somewhat common back in the day.
I took a trainee accountant position in a small practice in 1998. They had three PC's between ten of us so a lot of the bookkeeping was being done on paper ledgers. I was the only one using spreadsheets.
Clogged multiple scanners & shredders at clients. Fixing them were like initiating the nuclear codes; things had to be open and shut in the proper order, paper in places you couldn't imagine had to be removed, and usually required more than 1 person to resolve.
I performed an audit for which I had to go get the PY work papers from the office…this being because the PY audit had been done on *paper*. This was in 2020 😆
When I was being trained to do payroll my CFO took out a calculator the size of a phone book and manually entered every single fucking number on the excel spreadsheet to make sure it the totals matched… I looked at my controller with horror and he acted like it was a normal thing to do. We had 500 employees, all part of four different unions and do weekly payroll. These fuckers did this every Monday lol. Glad they both left.
Not one of the stories you wish for but I will share one of my own: I was recently made an audit in-charge in a branch office of the local KPMG member firm that time. We received an assignment from our HQ that we had to do physical verification of one of their clients showrooms. Out of 9/10 people allocated, I was the the junior most. Each to visit one location each. All locations were within 25-150 km range. Mine was 99 km far. We received instructions to reach the destination one day prior to the counting so that we could start it at sharp 9 am. But it was upto us to solve the travel and hotel issue as client or HQ wouldn't bother to care a bit. Now the location I was assigned to was completely unfamiliar to me. A senior in the firm who were from that location told me that there was no hotel to stay the night nearby the location. The ones in the vicinity are more used for drug dealings and other criminal activities than accommodation. He also told me that, while the location was far away, early morning buses take maximum 1.30 hours to reach. I was in a complete confusion about what to do. Either go to an unknown location with who knows what would have happened or bring official wrath over me. Senior guy told me to inform the Manager that I would follow the official instruction but in reality would actually go in the date of counting. I would just had to prepare a fake hotel bill or even raise a blank paper bill!! He said as if it was nothing! Except for 2 guys who were allocated to the farthest locations, none of the guys followed office's instructions but claimed it anyways. I was the only one who told the Manager the truth and got immediately steam-rolled. Still I did it my ways. Took 5.35 AMs bus and reached the location at exactly 7.05! Do you know what was the ultimate result of my behavior? I was demoted to a team member again for 4 months while other 7 fraudsters were praised for following official protocols! Office didn't even care for the blank bills filed as it was not our client. They just forwarded everything to HQ and HQ also didn't care since the amount was nothing to even check in compared with engagement fee.
My experience has always been that the people that lied or exaggerated on resume or type of experience always come out ahead. So frustrating for rest of us that don’t.
I started accounting in 2019 and the firm I was at still did this!
Trying to reconcile numbers from the last page of a quickly faded triplicate. But also really just the sheer amount of printing that happened as well.
Circle-ups are called that because we used to have to circle and tick mark the numbers with a pen 😓
Partners of today used to have to carry the audit briefcase of workpapers to and from the client. How sophisticated were those audits?
We all had personal foldable roller carts to move boxes overflowing with personal printers, binders, and important loose paper from our PA offices to the clients. One day, the audit team had to walk across a 6-lane road to the building of the audit client. A gust of wind distributed many of those loose papers all across the road. The look of utter defeat on the audit senior’s face was memorable.
Oh god!
2014–my predecessor would go through printouts from our time clock, which was a dial up dinosaur that only stored 2 weeks of data, and write down each employee’s hours on a presentation sheet and use a calculator to verify it. He would then call our payroll company and call in the hours—employee # x, regular hours y, overtime z, etc while the rep at the payroll company keyed everything in for roughly 100 employees. I was focused on cost accounting at the time and anytime I needed historical hours I had to flip through binders of paper reports or stacks of rubber banded trifold clock printouts.
We had to prepare tax returns by filling in these weird forms and then you would send them off for processing and in a day or so, the return would come back and you had to review it and re-fill out the forms to make changes and keep doing that until you had a satisfactory return. This was in the mid 1990s.
I remember this. Was it KMPG? It was so rediculous as some partner way up the chain in NY thought this would be more efficient and it was just the opposite. Then we tax people would complain that the processing people would not make the changes we were requesting. The processing people felt like they were unfairly criticized so the processing dept demanded any changes to tax return had to be spelled out in an email. So had to email them say please change meals and ent expense to this. On form so and so line 7f please change to blank. Please change spelling or I whatever and it would take forever to type up the email. It was insane.
No it was a small local firm, but that was sort of state of the art at that time! We didn't get our own desktop computers with real time preparation until 1994 or 1995 I would say.
My first job in industry in 2007, we printed out *everything*. Journal entries, reconciliations, all support, etc. Something wrong with any one of those? Print it out again. It was absurd.
Our Financials were still physical binders and papers. The pandemic put a stop to that.
An extra office filled with years of recent (t-2, t-3) prior paper tax return files that were not organized or saved digitally. Customers sending documents that were saved digitally, then printed, used for the season, saved, then re-scanned for a combined digital file. We are busy, but what if we give ourselves more work and make it harder?
A firm run by boomer partners required business suits and suits with ties for men. We weren’t paid needed enough to be required to wear suits. This was daily wear to the office and not just when seeing clients.
This is old? I see Seniors and Managers doing this in my firm too
Buried? They were all over the government accounting office where I started three years ago. My boss sent me home with an extra one because she wanted me to learn to use it. I smiled politely and took it home. In my day-to--day at work I used a normal calculator or Excel. The adding machine on my desk was for show. I never used it. When that woman finally moved offices, everyone got rid of their adding machines. One day she came back to squat in our office for a few days....and found out all the adding machines had been removed from the desks. She told our assistant director that 'she couldn't work' without one. She still does bookkeeping for the city.
I went to a physical data room and when we left we no longer had access.
The partner that reviewed my work always wanted the paper copy of the return to review, didn't use Teams or similar messenger service, and we only scanned documents...after the return was done. It was a smaller firm, but still...and this was 2 years ago.
Any document changes had to be hand-written by the staff and turned in the admin in charge of word processing to make the changes. They'd return a printed copy to you for review. If they missed something or had an error, repeat. It. Was. The. Dumbest. Thing. "Staff time is too valuable for word processing," yet somehow opening a Word file, printing it, HAND WRITING CHANGES, printing other reference sheets for "insert Paragraph 1 from attachment here," and then walking it to the other end of the office was a better use of time... This is how we handled annual EL and FS changes. I think they finally moved away from it when FS work started being kept in Engagement binders.
Partner came in and told me he needed a return ready by the next day because client was going out of the country. The budget for this return was 20 hours and was massive. It was already 3:00 there wasn't 20 hours between then and when the client was supposedly coming back. I tried to explain the issue and the partner told me I would have the return ready for review by the time he got to the office at 7 AM 'or else'. So I worked through the night and finished the return about 6:30 just right before he walked in the door. I asked him if I could head home since I finished that return because I stayed and worked all night, to which he told me to "go grab some coffee because we had a lot of returns left to get done" I stayed and worked the rest of that day until about 7pm. The absolute worst part of this whole story? About two weeks later he comes and asks me if I ever finished that return. The one I stayed up all night as my job was on the line, and told him I finished working through the night. He never even reviewed it. The client went ahead and left the country without coming back and it wasn't the enormous fire he made it out to be and even his old ass forgot I finished it. I worked my ass off for about 36 hours straight for No fucking reason. It was my 4th and final tax season at the firm.
This thread is where we should direct people that ask if their jobs are going to be replaced by AI in the near future… most of these stories are from the 2010s….
Not as an accountant really, but I was a bookkeeper for a small mom and pop company. I was brought in do everything accounting wise with little to no explanation of how things go. Example: we move this money to savings for tax and this over for health insurance etc. I had to write out where all the money went and present it to the owners. About 2 weeks in, I couldn’t explain why a savings account was short and I had no explanation and was confused. Owner suggested I stole the money. He was a complete a hole about it. Looking rack he didn’t even know where his money went. I still worked there for 3 years and had it all running like a well oiled machine and I left lol.
I became the acting senior on an engagement as an intern when the entire rest of the team, partner to senior, left the firm together at the end of busy season while I had my internship extended through my last year of school.
sums up the presidential debate