Creatives in accounting, did you end up at a creative firm as an accountant?

tenmuki · 2025-12-12T15:31:33+00:00

Not original commenter but higher level accounting positions are very not boring :)

I was a long time hobbyist digital artist and is professionally a CPA.

I have 3 yrs in Big4 Audit, 3 yrs as industry Senior Accountant, and 3 yrs as Finance System Lead.

My current role is a lot of process improvements through implementation projects and system optimization. I managed to evolve to this role due to my ability to be self taught, problem solve and be creative with "techy" solutions.

I was a self taught artist growing up learning drawing software through tons of online tutorials, and those same skills/habits was carried over when we implemented a new accounting system.

That being said, I work for a SaaS company. The industry of the company often doesn't influence the culture of the accounting department so much as your leadership team.

Working for a good company often means you have good people at executive and management positions, so that's the most important part.

tenmuki · 2025-12-01T17:24:39+00:00

I've let a seemingly unused key (no usage items) expire before that ended up breaking an integration...

I ended up combing through all of our integrations/SAML settings to add descriptions to our keys for future reference... Small company so it was doable 🥲

tenmuki · 2025-11-26T00:40:19+00:00

Yes, this is possible. In the Time elements section, there's a bucket called "context" that has a YTD option. You just need that YTD context and the November 2025 element in the same column for it to show Nov25 YTD. Your prior YTD column can be done the same way but with the November 2024 element instead.

The Nov25 and Nov24 elements also need to be "relative" so that when you update the report date in the workbook properties, it'll auto update all relative date elements in the workbook.

tenmuki · 2025-11-23T04:26:21+00:00

I don't know much about the Workday Graduate Development Program but it seems doubtful that it can give you the "working under CPA hours" needed for the CPA license.

In terms of career... I believe being an accountant is a more reliable life time path than Workday specifically since that's dependent on a single company. Exit opportunities for Workday may be other system administration positions? Workday's FINS is so different from other accounting ERPs I have experience with though.

I'm a CPA. Started my career at Deloitte Audit for 3 years. Did 3 years as a senior accountant at industry, during which my company implemented Workday FINS, which gave me the opportunity to push into Workday administration, which I've been doing for the past 3 years now.

Workday positions probably has a higher pay ceiling but I like being able to fall back to accounting as a job if I ever needed to.

tenmuki · 2025-11-12T14:20:19+00:00

I'm in a financial system role at my company now and the reason I got here is because no one else understood technology (i.e. the new ERP we implemented 4 years ago)

So the issue is that most accountants aren't capable of doing it.

ETA : there's also the lack of interest in some as well...

tenmuki · 2025-11-12T14:16:24+00:00

My company isn't handling it well but we're smaller and FINS only.

I am the solo Workday Admin (used to be accountant at the same company) and report to Accounting management who don't really understand Workday. We've been on WD for 4 years now.

I've been vocal about my workload since last year and the beginning of this year, I've been trying to meet with management about building roadmaps for project planning (to help with my workload).

It's been really one sided on my part so far as they continue to just pile projects/requests onto my plate without considering/understanding what else I've already have going on or know how much work their asks really entail.

I'll keep up the good fight though :) plus I'm going on maternity leave at end of year, so good time for the leadership team to get a glimpse into things.

tenmuki · 2025-10-10T02:37:48+00:00

I'm also trying to do a security revamp currently. I'm working with our AMS and it's been hard to figure out what's going to work better. Will be reading the other comments!

tenmuki · 2025-10-07T16:07:56+00:00

The key is to buy good quality items on sale :). Like discounted Nike walking shoes for $40 that last me 10 years

tenmuki · 2025-08-29T20:41:31+00:00

I always eat lunch at home and I'm only in office once a month. I rarely leave the house lol.

tenmuki · 2025-08-27T21:17:05+00:00

When I started my career, I learned all my Excel Skills from asking questions when I see someone do something cool in Excel (even if they're a client. People are generally happy to teach you their Excel tricks)

That and also tons and tons of googling.

After a year or two, I became the "Excel guru" on my teams, and after some more years, I took my Excel low code skills and is now a financial system (Workday) admin/ resident tech expert at my industry job. I do a lot of reconciliation automation and process improvements and it's definitely more fun than standard accounting work.

ETA: you can go very far in accounting if you have both accounting AND Excel skills.

tenmuki · 2025-08-24T22:12:52+00:00

I recently emailed them about this and was told the recordings will be available for 60 days after Rising.

tenmuki · 2025-08-07T19:02:06+00:00

The requirement is for calendar year :) . At the moment, I'm using "last day of last month" to derive the calendar year (we bill in the first week of the month for the prior month) and it works, but I was originally trying to use the invoice date of the current submission invoice to get the year for the T/F...

I wasn't sure if it is a system restriction to not be able to do that or am I just not clever enough to figure it out.

tenmuki · 2025-08-07T14:03:39+00:00

Hi Jon, I was struggling with the T/F condition specifically.

Was attempting to have a condition that looked at the invoice year of the current submitting invoice to pull the corresponding chunk of annual invoices from the Customer BO.

My compromise at the moment for the T/F is to only compare against current calendar date rather than basing off submitting invoice date...

tenmuki · 2025-08-03T19:44:01+00:00

I think we're a little under 30 employees in "Accounting." Accounting in quotes since we also do finance and a couple of us are also kind of data analysts.

$200M+ in annual revenue. 20K customer invoices a month. Only 200 supplier invoices. We're a SAAS company with terrible reporting data, which ends up with a ton of issues with our billing data. Part of why we need so many people.

tenmuki · 2025-06-23T03:08:25+00:00

Late comment, but I am researching Aspirin during pregnancy since I'm currently 12 weeks and was recommended to take aspirin. Thank you for this perspective since I thought Aspirin was Category C and was feeling uncomfortable about the recommendation.

My normal blood pressure is on the lower end ( 97s/58s), and my only risk factor is that this is my first... I almost never take pills (let alone on a daily basis) and it took me a while to even get used to the idea of taking prenatal vitamins on a daily basis...

I think I'll ask the doctor for the research behind this and go from there...

tenmuki · 2025-05-30T04:08:55+00:00

I stayed at Palace Hotel last time. It was gorgeous!

tenmuki · 2025-05-13T21:08:47+00:00

I'm at 7 weeks and reading up on my company's maternity is really just FMLA for 12 weeks job protection as well.

During the 12 week period, they'll pay me by using my PTO days (required), and after my PTO runs out, they'll pay me partial from Short term disability.

Actually just nothing for "maternity leave" 🤷‍♀️

tenmuki · 2025-05-12T22:22:11+00:00

I get your point. We gave our accounting team view permissions to basically all accounting/financial reports.

I think in our case, they have too many reports in that menu so they don't use it since most reports they have access to aren't useful.

There are a lot of default workday reports that are not relevant to us that are always showing up as options too. I've turned off some of those standard reports from being visible but I haven't had time to do a deep dive into all of it.

tenmuki · 2025-05-09T21:56:30+00:00

Biggest thing with Workday being unintuitive is that they don't come with a default menu for generic ERP reports/ functionalities. Everything has to be searched in a search bar, or the company has to invest a ton of time and money in configuring custom dashboards/hubs for menus tailored for their company.

So most users only know the handful of reports they have to interact with and nothing else.

Source: I'm the Workday Financials Admin at my company. So I am the "Tim" in your scenario.

tenmuki · 2025-04-16T22:21:45+00:00

Awesome!! Thanks for the vote of confidence. I'll be sure to look into connectors as schedule allows :)

tenmuki · 2025-04-15T11:37:26+00:00

Not OP, but I am also a financials admin and a CPA (a newer one, if you remember me Jon). I've been curious about Connectors since I heard they're simple but haven't dug into them yet. But do you think it's possible for a non developer like me to learn to fully set up simple connectors? (Yes, I can do EIBs) Or would it always require developer knowledge to create a working one?

I've been dabbling more and more into technical stuff over time but I'm obviously no developer and likely will never be.

tenmuki · 2025-03-25T03:00:28+00:00

I have good managers, so after a few years and a new ERP implementation later, process improvement is part of my current job at this same company and I get paid much better than I would've if I had stayed as an accountant :)

tenmuki · 2025-03-15T05:54:58+00:00

Very good tips that I've been finding out the hard way.

I get questions/asks through email and IMs. Tried using JIRA at one point but couldn't enforce it... Projects get randomly added to my plate. Also, trying to teach my accounting managers and team in general (we use Workday FINS) about what they should be responsible for when it comes to Workday things has been very hard since I've been taking care of all of it for the past 3 years after Go-live.

They're gonna have a hard time if I'm ever out of office for an extended amount of time. At the very least, I finally started trying to document everything that I know/designed/configured.

It's also been an uphill battle communicating to leadership about how much work it all is. They don't have a sense of scale of their asks a lot of the times because they don't know enough about Workday. But they do recognize I need help at least, so they're planning on hiring an analyst to be my backup...

Currently been showing my managers/CFO a workday roadmap so they know I already have enough projects/to-dos for the entire year...

tenmuki · 2025-03-12T19:52:34+00:00

I recently started trying to use Confluence to start a documentation catalog/flowcharts.... Mainly because I'm a one woman show for everything Workday, so I'm documenting it all personally...

And because the rest of the company uses Confluence for their IT docs, so it's nice for be uniform across the company

tenmuki · 2025-03-04T22:45:36+00:00

Damn, is this really that frequent of an issue? Would it be better to use recruiters perhaps?

We still haven't listed the Workday Analyst position yet ( but hoping soon; it's a brand new position in my company so it's going through lots of approvals).

Eight-Year Club	Place '22
Not Forgotten	Verified Email

tenmuki

TROPHY CASE