Career Options for an Accountant
A wide range of career options is accessible for CPAs (Certified Public Accountants) and those pursuing this degree. The size and scope of the organizations in need of qualified public accountants may vary, and so do the areas in which an accountant may work. An accountant can delve into tax, internal auditing, reconciliation, and reporting. The choice of career options is plentiful. A person with a CPA degree could become, for instance, an IT consultant or an auditing clerk and succeed on the country, state or domestic level. Many opportunities can be also discovered in the sphere of education and in non-commercial organizations (CPA Career Paths, 2015).
The Auditing Clerk Career
What auditing clerks do is conduct financial transactions, record the sum of cash, checks and documents they receive, and make sure that they are relevant. Auditing clerks also check for mathematical mistakes made by other clerks and either correct them or point them out to the others. In addition, they report on income statements and any inaccuracy they register in the records. Auditing clerks make mathematical calculations with basic formulae or advanced ones.
Auditing clerks are provided with special accounting software and in the most cases operate through computers, retrieving, recording, calculating, and storing the data in electronic databases. It is a must for XXI century clerks to have at least essential computing skills to be able to perform additional tasks such as, for instance, accounting payrolls, billing and tracking bills that are past due. Freelance and officially employed auditing clerks are frequently in charge of communicating with customers.
As to the skills of a successful auditing clerk, the most crucial are the computer skills. With the active computerization of self-respecting business enterprises, it is necessary for a clerk to know his/her way around a PC and be a competent user of bookkeeping programs. Furthermore, a good clerk should be very accurate with figures since the main focus of auditing is no-error financial records. He/she should be able to spot his/her own mistakes, as well as the others’.
Another feature of a competent auditing clerk is the ability to keep the data confidential. Indeed, such clerks have access to their employers’ financial documents, which are to be dealt with carefully and kept secret. Finally, it is well known that numbers are what auditing clerks deal with, which is why they should be qualified in terms of arithmetic (Bookkeeping, Accounting, and Auditing Clerks, 2014).
The Fundamental Concepts of Accounting
The main aim of accounting is to estimate an organization’s business activity and save the data for future analysis. The data are delivered in the form of reports, spreadsheets, and other documents to the persons in charge of decision-making. The latter consider the given information and further regulate the course of business (Needles et al., 2012).
The basic accounting equation can be illustrated by the following formula: Assets = Liabilities + Owner’s Equity. The main financial statements are used for providing people who are interested in a business with the information about this business. Needles et al. (2012) states that there are four main financial statements, that are the income statement, the statement of the owner’s equity, the balance sheet, and the statement of cash flows (p. 8-9). Financial reporting is, to put it bluntly, giving an account of the financial conditions of the business to those concerned (Needles et al., 2012).
References
Bookkeeping, Accounting, and Auditing Clerks. (2014). Web.
CPA Career Paths: Common Career Paths. (2015). Web.
Needles, B., Powers M., & Crosson, S. (2012). Principles of Accounting. Boston, United States: Cengage Learning.