3 Questions New Accountants Should Ask on Every Assignment
Whether you're in public accounting or an industry, as a new accountant, you're going to have questions. Financial careers are known for being fast paced and having on-the-job training, and accounting is no exception. Even though learning is part of the process, you should still do your best to respect others time and learn as quickly as possible. Today, I'm going to share with you three important questions. You should ask your senior or manager when they give you a new assignment to make everything go smoothly. Let's jump in!
When does this need to be done?
As an accountant, you likely have more than one thing to do at a time and understanding the priority of your assignments is essential to managing the stress of the job. Especially in public accounting, it is common to have multiple deliverables for multiple managers open at one time. It's also a great question to ask because it is never safe to assume your manager's level of urgency. To put it simply, some things need to be done in the next 3 weeks and other things need to be done in the next 3 hours. Make sure you know the difference before starting the work!
How long do you think it should take to do this?
Time is a valuable resource to everyone, and no one likes time being wasted. Accountants are usually delegated work because the more experienced delegator can use their time to support more advanced initiatives, but that doesn't mean you can take all the time in the world. Public accounting firms make money by taking the hours you spend on tasks and billing them out to clients. Those clients are smart enough to understand that it shouldn't take 10 hours to do a single bank reconciliation. By asking this question for every assignment you get, you will begin to learn your expected level of effort and efficiency on an assignment, two key pieces of information that are essential to your learning and improvement.
If something isn't making sense, how long should I spend trying to figure it out myself?
Not all accounting work is created the same, and on the job, training looks different for every task. Every accountant learns differently, but it's important that you understand the difference between necessary exposure to a task and spinning your wheels. I put this question in here because most of the time a new hire gets in trouble, it's because they waited too long to ask a question about their assignment that they were stuck on. By asking this question up front, you can drastically reduce the probability that you become the person who takes multiple hours trying to figure something out themselves because they didn't want to “look dumb” in front of their manager.
Asking questions like these every time you get a new assignment allows you to gain a perspective you probably have not yet been exposed to. In the process of asking these questions, you will display your emotional intelligence and respect for your coworkers’ time which are two essential skills for a career in accounting. Now get out there and deliver!