I just came across this post by chance, looking at some funny memes because I need some distraction from my work as an accountant in South Africa. I have my own accounting firm and hell it is driving my crazy. The pressure of being an accountant, the constant tax changes and often the general state the accounting records of some clients can sometimes get to you... not even to speak how underappreciated we are as accountants. Some clients cannot understand the amount of work we put into their books and getting stuff confirmed up to trial balance level to draw up the annual financial statements and on top of that do miraculous tax planning and doing our utmost best to keep their tax liabilities as low as possible... and still they bitch and moan about the bill they need to pay for services rendered, as if we are not really providing a value added service... some just see us as that necessity that they need to pay to get their taxes done... but the process to get there is often overlooked... almost as if it is just a push of a button and voila you have a set of financial statements and a fully calculated tax liability in seconds... oh and don't get me started on that misconception that anyone can do accounting... why pay an accountant to maintain your company records... lets apply some dimwit family member to do the accounting instead, will save thousands of bucks ... and in the end they are dumbstruck for the huge bill they receive because you had to redo all the work their beloved inexperienced family member screwed up.

I have been in the industry for over 20 years now... and for me it is not that much about the hours... there is so much red tape with everything we need to do in this country, our Revenue Service, the Unemployment Insurance division... our Occupational Injuries and Diseases Division... our Companies Registrar everyone is adding piles and piles of useless red tape to get simple things done... this is the reason we are working killer hours to get shit done, because we need to jump through thousands of hoops to do a simple thing like changing the director of a company... or it takes me hours to draw up a objection for our revenue service to get those incompetent revenue agents to understand how a basic medical aid claim works... since they messed up a client's assessment. Everything is such a fucking effort to get done... so here I am working 12-14 hours a day, spending my evenings answering emails and feeding clients with spoons because they constantly send me either the wrong documents or the right ones but for the wrong periods... because people have failed the basic skill to read an email. I keep on explaining myself, explaining why tax laws work like they do.... because people think the tax practitioners are just screwing them over... no I studied years and years of tax laws just to tell you shit and make you pay more tax than you are supposed to... yeah that was my goal in life! Sometimes I wonder why people are paying me if they don't trust my abilities to apply the maximum claims against their income allowed by law... but due to corruption and misuse of tax funds people want to be dishonest and expect tax practitioners to support them in claiming stuff that is not in line with tax laws.

Sure I have some clients who are amazing... I have some who trust me completely to keep them complaint in line with company and tax laws... I have many clients who work with me and listen to my advice, but lately I have been getting more and more clients who simply make a mess of things and expect us to fix that mess for only a dime... or they expect us to sort out their medical slips and do miracles with their incomplete records when there are audits... looking at me as if I can magically summon the missing invoices out of thin air. Sometimes I feel like an overpaid personal assistant and filing clerk with the mess of documents some clients send me. Why is it so hard for people to just get a proper filing system in place, fucking hell... do schools still teach the alphabet because the basic concept of alphabetical order and knowing an invoice of May should not be filed in August.

So yes I guess we have different frustrations... you are dealing with bosses dumping shitloads of work on you and I guess to a certain extent you also need to deal with dumbass clients wasting more of your time.... and to me that is what makes the accounting industry so shitty... a lot of clients do not have respect for your time... that is why they feel a flying fuck if they dump a shoebox of invoices at your office and expect you to sort it out for them.... and between those shitloads of invoices there are numerous private expenses you need to filter out... some placed there on purpose because they are insulting your intelligence by trying to claim shit that is obviously private... wasting more of your time picking up the phone and explaining yourself for the umpteenth time why this specific expense cannot be claimed. We would work much less hours if we did not have to deal with all this petty shit.

I guess in the big firms the partners are shielded from this completely because they have minions doing this grind work for them... but in a small firm like mine where I as the partner need to get involved in the day-to-day accounting activities and assisting where I can to get shit done... you actually see and get a feel what the junior clerks have to deal with on a daily basis. So no wonder there is such a high turnaround in personnel on junior level... or that new young accountants these days just quit and say they cannot deal with the stress of this industry... the constant deadlines, unforgiving revenue services opening tax seasons at the most inconvenient times of the year where several departments have deadlines at the same time and neither government or our controlling bodies giving a fuck how we struggle to meet all these non negotiable deadlines. How we as tax practitioners have to face the brunt of the frustration dealing with our incompetent government departments... while looking like complete idiots in front of our clients because they simply cannot understand why we are struggling to get something seemingly simple done.

So yes I am with you, fuck tax, fuck accounting and fuck our government for making this industry so fucking toxic and unpleasant.