1. Public Practice versus Industry
What do Accountants do?
Public Practice versus Industry
I am Susan Szep and I’m a certified public accountant. I’ve worked in industry for the past 20 years. My professional career has revolved around numbers. When someone says CPA, what do you think of? (Pause . . .)
Taxes, good – Money, etc
CPAs who are in public practice are hired by others to perform various services, such as taxes, book keeping and financial reports, helping folks set up their businesses so they can keep track of records, auditing, which is when a CPA comes in and reviews how you are conducting your business, or consulting, which can include a whole range of advice, from wills, to buying a new business, installing new computer systems – almost anything! Accounting involves the ability to reason, solve, and propose new ideas.
CPAs who work in industry are hired by companies to do everything from payroll, accounting, figuring up how much a product costs to make, preparing financial statements that let the company know how they’re doing – but gosh – if that was all, I’d be bored silly doing this job.

2. How to price a product Costs: Benefits: Materials Extra sales
Labor (overtime?)
Utilities
Administration
Benefits:
Extra sales
Big order
Opportunity for repeat business
One company I worked for wanted to know how low we could price a vaccine for a bid they wanted to give to UNICEF – who really needs to be able to buy the most vaccine for the money they have in order to vaccinate children around the world. I had to know how much it cost to make the product – including not only the stuff that went directly into the vaccine, but how many workers we needed to produce that extra amount, how much extra electricity we’d be using to run the machinery, and how much extra paperwork the folks in the office would need to complete for this order.

3. The government influences business through tax incentives!
Open a new factory?
Costs:
New building & machines
Relocate workers
Train new workers
Extra shipping
Benefits:
HUGE tax break!
Another time, I worked on a project to help decide if they should open a new manufacturing plant in Puerto Rico, which, even though it would mean extra costs to ship the vaccines back to the mainland, there were huge tax breaks available for economic development in Puerto Rico that more than offset the extra shipping costs. We had to know not only how much vaccine we thought we could manufacture over there, but the costs of starting up a plant, with relocating people, training new people, buying all of the machinery – as well as understanding the details of the tax code so that we’d be sure we were doing things correctly in order to get the tax break.
The government influences business through tax incentives!

4. Business Cycles
Often, I have done trend analysis – a favorite one is to look at how a business cycles:
Look at this sales chart – 3 years worth of sales.
Look what happens at the end of every quarter – the huge spike! Sales men are given quarterly quotas, and are paid bonuses for making their quotas. So, it appears as if they are procrastinating until the last possible moment to drum up the business. The month following a quarter – they look exhausted. And then they perk back up again. But, there could be other stories to explain this. It could be it takes a long time to work a customer - or sometimes customers know that the salesmen are getting desperate at the end of the quarter and are more likely to give them a price break if they hold out on their order until them!
What do you think explains this blip on the chart? A price increase took effect in September, and customers wanted to place their orders before the price increase!

5. Accountants
There are only three kinds of accountants: those who can count, and those who can’t.
So you can see, numbers give us all kinds of insight as to what is going on with a company. And, it’s important as accountants not just to work the numbers, but to present them in ways that other people can understand. Because of our skill set in doing this, we are involved in many interesting projects with engineers, buyers, sales people, and management. Because of this interaction, there are lots of opportunities for us to grow our careers into other areas besides just the accounting department. But it is our basic facility with numbers, and our ability to translate the story that the numbers are telling us that is the foundation for our career success.
(It’s a joke!)