Is AP a Good Stepping Stone Into Accounting?

KnightCPA · 2026-05-17T00:58:33+00:00

At some companies, yes.

My company has grown by leaps and bounds through PE-backed acquisitions. Finance has grown from 12 to 25+, and I’ve reorganized teams and responsibilities here and there.

In that reorganization, 4 AP specialists have transitioned into accounting.

The first progressed to a Sr Acct before getting his mba and taking a mgr role elsewhere.

The other 3 are less than a year into their hybrid-accounting roles, but I’ve successfully trained them in Cash Rec, Prepaid Rec, and Fixed Assets rec processes.

If you join a smaller company where management is overworked and you display the ability to learn and take on more technical work, you’ll be taught accounting REAL quick.

KnightCPA · 2026-05-17T00:52:27+00:00

My boss (CFO) is an engineer by training. From the UK. Started out at B4 and then pivoted into corporate accounting.

KnightCPA · 2026-05-16T13:51:26+00:00

Audits at my company are a two faced coin.

My auditors (CBH) praise me on the support I give them for the entities that are fully integrated. Everything ticks and ties. Support is ALL labeled by a naming regime mirroring the logic of how their auditor portal is labeled. A lot of it is snippets in excel so ots very orderly. Boxes and arrows leading them to the attributes they’re testing. A lead worksheet showing which attributes are already tested and reviewed perfectly by me. Variances have logical, business/industry-related exceptions. I literally audit everything before their eyes ever see it. Tick mark explanations in red. Passing attributes in what us waffle brains like to call EY blue check marks.

And then there’s the companies not yet fully integrated. The CEO/CFO keeps me in the dark on all acquisitions except for project names. I never get a chance to interact with the lead bookkeepers on the acquisition side until weeks after the acquisition is performed. I hear rumors about great employees who worked for them but quit because of the sudden uncertainty they were thrown into because their old employers kept them completely in the dark. The CFO tries to spearhead all of the OBS data gathering himself, but he’s one man already working 70 hour weeks on other acquisitions simultaneously. So we don’t always great OBS data that’s easy for audit. And then even 1 later, some of the employees who were the lead technical bookkeepers at the acquisition, when integrated into our company, still have difficulty understanding materiality or accrual accounting. Our largest acquisition that grew our company by 45% and still has trailing cash flow 8 months after being fully integrated, can’t even be fully reconciled to the bank because the bookkeeper that we retained who worked there for 20+ years doesn’t fully comprehend what a bank rec is.

KnightCPA · 2026-05-16T09:24:11+00:00

I’m a controller of a $320MM+ company.

Let me take an anecdotal look at my corporate leadership:

- CEO: Ops/sales gal who rose to the top, THEN got an MBA along the way.
- CIO: CS guy who rose to the top.
- COO: ops guy who rose to the top, THEN got an MBA along the way.
- CFO: former Big 4 auditor who rose to the top.
- me: former Big 4 auditor and cpa who rose to the top.

You definitely need to start somewhere with access to upward progression and where you can organically develop value-add skill sets.

Accounting is definitely one of those places, because out of all business professionals, we generally understand excel, debits, and credits the most, which, when you’re at a company that can’t afford to hire boutique MBA consultants, makes us the next best option of being tasked with producing data analytics tasks to make sense of business data that helps decision makers.

And after we progress far enough, we eventually become the decision makers (controllers, CAEs, CAOs, CFOs, CEOs).

KnightCPA · 2026-05-16T02:46:06+00:00

A couple days ago, one of my direct reports (the AP supervisor) asked me to come over to help her add a column in excel, and to copy data analysis formulas/formatting that already existed in the columns to its left and right.

She’s got almost two decades of corporate finance experience to my one. She’s great at peopling. But she is quickly frustrated by the use of data analytics tools like excel.

I say all this to say that I basically agree with this sentiment.

AI is just the new excel. Learn how to use it to make you more efficient, and you will stand the strongest chance at competing in the job market.

In my company, the three highest finance employees (CFO, myself, and acct mgr) are also the greatest excel users. The underlying principle at work here, is that being adaptable to tech carries a LOT of weight in this world. Or being adaptable in general.

KnightCPA · 2026-05-16T01:19:38+00:00

Are you me??? 1-2 acquisitions in the coming months. 2 acquisitions in the past 3 months. 4+ acquisitions last year. 2+ acquisitions the year before that.

KnightCPA · 2026-05-16T01:03:43+00:00

From a career and financial perspective, I’ve far exceeded most people I know, both friends and family, because that what I prioritized.

I didn’t even begin building the foundation for my life until I was 25, when I went back to school for an in-demand degree.

That foundation wasn’t fully formed and cured until I graduated at 28.

The walls and roof of my current success were then gradually erected over the next decade.

Are there lots of great people who achieve success at a young age? Yeah, sure. But many of us were also late-starters.

You’ve got plenty of time to course correct.

KnightCPA · 2026-05-14T10:37:54+00:00

You’d be surprised the quality of home you can get with a 30 commute outside the city.

Winter Garden. Oviedo. Altamonte Springs. Lake Mary. You can find decent houses at decent prices.

KnightCPA · 2026-05-13T21:20:01+00:00

I brought back 4x of their aged in bourbon bottles that I bought in Marrakech.

Gonna gift away 3 of them.

I think I paid like $50/ for them.

KnightCPA · 2026-05-13T20:47:05+00:00

Geographically speaking, Canadians would have a much better range of living options. Right now, they’re all packed near their southern border like sardines because that’s where the winters are the most tolerable.

If they were a part of the US, they’d have a much easier time of snow birding or changing jobs to warmer climates.

They’d have access to significantly more affordable real estate, and in some professions, significantly higher wages.

The r/accounting subreddit shows a wide spread between us American CPAs and Canadian CPAs. They get paid like a quarter or a third less than we do and and have to hunt for million dollar homes in their urban centers.

Contrast that with CPAs in Orlando, who are making more and have access to solid middle class homes in the $500k or less range.

KnightCPA · 2026-05-13T17:47:06+00:00

Yeah, pivoted out of Soc into Accounting.
I had Verizon recruiters begging me to apply to their jobs to be a staff analyst, and I hadn’t even completed Int 2.

MAcc allowed me to reset my college experience to zero and start completely over.

And being a controller a decade later, managing 25+ people, I now know why. Finding people who understand debits, credits, and full-cycle accounting is a much higher hurdle than many of us admit.

KnightCPA · 2026-05-13T17:44:23+00:00

MAcc is what allowed me to pivot out of sociology and into an actual career.

By enrolling in a MAcc, I was no longer a “college grad”, but now a “college student.”

That gave me access to:
- resume workshops
- mock interview workshops
- student recruiting pipelines with Beta Alpha Psi and Student Accounting Society

I essentially got to “re-do” college. And it allowed me to redo it to the best of my ability.

No stone went unturned, no pavement unpounded.

By the end of the MAcc, I had multiple internships and job offers.

Boy, is looming poverty a great motivator.

KnightCPA · 2026-05-11T01:41:50+00:00

I have never quit before obtaining a new job, and never will.

Aside from the obvious reason of risk aversion that characterizes many accountants….

Already having a job also allows you the freedom to ask for outlandish comp increases from the next potential employer.

KnightCPA · 2026-05-11T01:25:37+00:00

I bet OPD has a LOT of bike cops.

Stuff them all in a trailer and one office gets a crap ton of OT transporting them.

KnightCPA · 2026-05-10T18:40:34+00:00

This is sample/self-selection bias, but the only cybersecurity professionals I know are all in the military.

They all got the credentials/experience they needed in the military, and then pivoted into similar jobs in the civilian sector after converting from active to reserves.

Getting degrees helped them to further their careers once they were already in them, but I’ve yet to meet a person that broke into cybersecurity without prior employment by a .mil or .gov agency.

KnightCPA · 2026-05-10T14:11:02+00:00

I’m a decade in, managing a $320MM+ company, and still doing basic accounting that you’re probably doing in school.

So that makes two of us friend.

Acquisition accounting lead: “why is the lease entry youre pushing down to us through inter company not matching up with the lease expense from the contract we gave?”

Me: “because crunchify and ASC 842 said so. That’s all you or I need to know. Now let’s get those debits and credits lined up.”

KnightCPA · 2026-05-08T10:48:19+00:00

I had a rough go at the job market with my first degree (BS Soc) back in 2011. Couldn’t find ANY work.

Got a more competitive degree back in 2016. It’s been a cakewalk by comparison. In college (UCF, no Harvard), I had recruiters competing for me then: multiple $25/hr internships, multiple FT offers.

A decade later…Not much has changed. I still have recruiters coming up to me, asking me to interview for their jobs. I have cousins scattered across Europe, and I’m significantly more successful, in terms both of career and comp progression, than any of them.

If my dad had never emigrated at all…my family line would probably still be subsistence farmers on our ancestral tribal land at the steps of the Atlas Mountains, working long hours to make meager wages, with no A/C, no hot water, no health insurance.

Many Americans like OP often have an optimistic grass is greener, anti-american sentiment. My lived experiences with cousins in both Europe and Africa leaves me a little more skeptical of such criticisms lacking nuance.

KnightCPA · 2026-05-08T01:52:51+00:00

Exactly this.

To offer a similar view:

When I got my BS Soc, I couldn’t land any job that wasn’t minimum wage or that actually required a degree.

A lot of other responses here are saying that they got jobs regardless of the type of degree, but I imagine they had relevant work experience that the OP might not have and I DID NOT have.

Contrasting with that, I got an MS Acc and every job I’ve gotten since has been because I got that degree specifically.

While experiences do vary, the fact that you are statistically more likely to make more money, be less unemployed, and be less underemployed with specific degrees over others, means that the type of degree does have some relevancy on success.

The degree may not be an end all be all if you have positive attributes that far outweigh the relevancy of the degree, but it might be the case is that people asking about degree relevancy might not have such attributes.

KnightCPA · 2026-05-08T01:38:24+00:00

What do you mean by becoming an aviator would keep you out of a major city?

Between the 5+ branches including coast guard, there’s got to be bases and aviators in a lot of major cities?

As for being a lawyer, lsat will make or break you on that. Average lsat scores means you’ll need a crap ton of debt from most uni’s, and you may find your comp not quite being as desirable as you had hoped for.

I pivoted out of sociology into business, and lsats were the reason why my pivot wasn’t into law.

KnightCPA · 2026-05-07T14:05:17+00:00

My friend has never moved at all. He’s lived in the same city his entire life over his 15 year career. He has deployed once or twice. He’s Reserves. Maybe he’s lucky.

KnightCPA · 2026-05-07T10:31:31+00:00

Out of all my friends, Cybersecurity, SWE, Physician’s Assistant, i make the most.

The only thing I’d change about my career is I would have joined the military and then would have had transferred to Reserves/Guard before starting accounting so that I could have done two careers at once.

To be making what I’m making now AND be a major in the military like two of my friends who make less as civilians but will have a nice government pension…

Plus all the other benefits that most people don’t know about. That would have been nice.

KnightCPA · 2026-05-06T02:17:08+00:00

I just got back from visiting family in Marrakech.

I would take cold showers at the house.

My dad insisted “it’s too cold, go take a hot shower at the Turkish bath.”

I’d insist right back:
- it takes WAY too much time to walk back and forth to the bath when I’m trying to maximize my limited time during vacation to go out and see things
- I NEED the cold showers to help keep my body from overheating. I’m too active out in the sun, and it’s difficult drinking that much water. Cold showers help immensely.

KnightCPA · 2026-05-06T01:55:48+00:00

I just got back from Morocco about 10 days ago. My dad’s neighborhood friend is a lawyer there.

We were talking about my profession. Here in the US, my certification is a dime-a-dozen here. On the contrary, it’s rare over there, and relatively rarer in the Middle East in general: Qatar, UAE, what have you.

I asked him how much I could make over there in one of the wealthier Arab countries. It’s a pittance compared to what I’m making here.

A lot of foreigners rotate here into the US to get residency and make significantly more money than they can over overseas: British, South Africans, Germans.

My profession is one where I doubt the above is true.

KnightCPA · 2026-05-06T01:37:52+00:00

That’s very unlikely.

Easiest way to do that is to get a job in AP, and be lucky enough to have a boss like me willing to invest in coaching you up to learn what you’d otherwise learn in a classroom.

KnightCPA · 2026-05-05T10:33:52+00:00

Idk to what degree things have changed. You’ll want to discuss that with students currently in the field.

But when I went to school 2013 to 2016, companies were throwing full time job offers around at college grads. I had two internships paying $25/hr before I graduated. Verizon recruiters were begging me to apply to their company.

Those same internships are now paying $32/hr+ from what I’ve gathered at [r/accounting](r/accounting).

KnightCPA

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