why it was so valuable and how to gain that knowledge now.
by ed mendlowitz
call me before you do anything: the art of accounting
writeups are extinct. when i started in 1963, most small cpa firms primarily did writeups. after i started my practice in 1969, it became an embarrassment to say i did writeups. it connoted something beneath my “professional” status.
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i think a problem today is that writeups no longer exist for younger staff.
writeups were literally writing up a client’s cash disbursements and receipts journals, entering sales and purchases, reconciling the bank accounts, taking off a trial balance and accounts receivable schedule, making some adjusting and recurring journal entries and preparing a financial statement. it also included writing out and mailing customers’ statements, and where purchase journals were used, preparing an accounts payable schedule. we did the client’s bookkeeping.
where the client was a little larger and had a bookkeeper, the cpa did the posting to the general ledger. making the adjusting entries and preparing the financial statement was the accountant’s function. with today’s software, the writeup is done as a byproduct of entering the original transactions.
one of the things learned from writeups was how a business operated financially: how money came in, how it went out, how sales were recorded, customers’ buying patterns and how they paid their bills, what our client purchased and received, and how they paid their suppliers. sometimes a client’s receivables were factored, or the client needed financing of overseas purchases, and then you really learned how money flowed.
when you are young and start out, you do not necessarily appreciate what you are asked to do because you think you are working on the lower level of less important things. however, what i eventually learned is that everything has a place and purpose, and beginners need to start at the beginning. writeups were for beginners.
i think an effective training program for young staff today would be a hands-on overview of how transactions flow through an organization, something similar to the writeups i did when i began my career. maybe that is a project i will get to one of these days.
addenda: reader comments
mendlowitz: i received a very nice phone call from a reader thanking me for writing about writeups. the caller said that he learned from doing write-ups where things came from, where they went and everything in between. he also learned how to find errors and got an overview of the entire business. he also said that it is a shame that many of today’s young accountants don’t have this kind of experience – and perhaps it should be taught in the colleges.
uppal: how true. it was a great foundation and a lot of practical experience very relevant at that time. today accountants and expectation from the profession are quite different. but old memories are nostalgic.
following is an email someone sent to me with his thoughts on write-ups that i fully agree with. he prefers that i do not mention his name.
ed,
great article in accounting today on write-ups and i couldn’t agree with you more!
when i graduated from college in 1993, i took a job at a small cpa firm in my hometown of cincinnati, ohio. even with a good gpa and some actual experience having worked for a very small local firm in college, it was a tough job market so i “settled” for this job with a small firm. it wasn’t the glamorous “big 8” (at that time) job that some of my classmates obtained but looking back it was the best thing that ever happened to me. i, too, started off my career doing “write-up” work. at first i thought it was pretty mundane work until i realized that i knew more about my clients’ businesses than they did for the most part, which allowed me to become a great consultant and made me a valuable resource for them … not to mention, i was learning a heck of a lot about how business works … to your point in your article.
a few years later i had the opportunity to connect with some of my classmates who went the big 8 route and some were either no longer employed there or had been pigeonholed into doing very specific, repetitive tasks … at that point, i felt like i had leaped them by a mile in true “business” knowledge! when i told them what i was doing, they were amazed and to be quite honest, some didn’t even know what i was talking about!
in short, when i look back on my career, i credit this write-up “training ground” so to speak for many of the successes that i have had as a cpa and what i have achieved thus far in my career. i also agree with you 110 percent on how this could be an effective training program for young staff. here at our firm, i practice this approach by “highly encouraging” our staff to do a “tour” in outsourcing (our really cool term for write-ups these days!) as i believe it gives them a chance to see how things work (full spectrum) and provides a solid accounting foundation for them no matter if they choose to specialize in audit or tax.
ed, great piece and i just wanted to let you know this article definitely hit close to home for me! thanks!