034 Why Everyone Says, “I Could Never Be an Accountant!” And How That’s The Root of Your Financial Disorganization

I hear so many people say that they could never be an accountant or bookkeeper, and today I want to discuss why this sentiment is actually what holds people back from being financially literate about their small business.

We talk about what exactly folks are saying or believing about accountants, why I think they say these things, and then how this rhetoric is impacting you and your ability to discern your financial data and make informed business choices.

As always, you can follow me on my socials and get on my email list for more tips on how to do your bookkeeping better, reminders and information about taxes, and all the ways you can improve your relationship to your money mindset.

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This week’s episode is about shit that I hear people saying about accountants. And it’s not outright shitting on accounting and bookkeeping as professions, but it’s kind of sneaky in the way that people talk about our industry and how they separate themselves from it. I wanted to participate (or really start) this discourse with you and would love to hear your thoughts. Do you hear people saying this as often as I do? It’s probably confirmation bias, like when you purchase a new car you suddenly see it everywhere. Maybe because I am an accountant, I notice people saying this more often. Last week I hosted a webinar for creatives to teach them about their business finances and my 3-step process to financial organization. And I talked a little bit about this topic during the webinar. Before we get started, I have a favor to ask. If you enjoy this episode, or any other podcast episode I’ve put out, please leave this show a rating and a review on whatever platform you’re listening. And sharing also helps me boost my engagement and reach more small business folks like yourself! Why Everyone Says, “I Could Never Be an Accountant!” And How That’s The Root of Your Financial Disorganization I hear people who are brilliant and innovative and intelligent and fearless, say in their own words that they could never be an accountant. That was never their calling, they would be lost in all the numbers and tax law, that’s not their area to shine. They say just hire an accountant and not worry about figuring out your business finances yourself. Leave it to the professionals and the experienced accountants to deal with your money and taxes. It’s not something you need to learn and master as a business owner so it’s a waste of time to focus on that. You wouldn’t learn how to code and build and design a website when you could just pay someone else to do that for you. It’s not something you should invest your time and effort into when it’s not a marketable skill that you could turn around and charge money for (this is the crux of the issue, right?). They say to treat your accounting and bookkeeping and taxes the same way: to not invest time and energy into understanding it, even if you hire someone else to “take care of it for you”. Here’s why I think people say these things: They are looking out for your best interests when it comes to accounting, even though they are not an accountant (as they’ve made sure to point out). I think that these folks truly do have your time and energy and resources at heart when they give this advice and tell you why THEY have not “wasted” time on paying attention to and trying to understand their business finances. But, they’re giving away the plot from the beginning: they are not an accountant or a CPA, they don’t understand their finances, and so of course they’re going to tell you that it’s not worth your time to try to make sense of it! It’s not an investment in your business that you can turn around and charge more for or pass on the cost. Accounting and bookkeeping are necessary parts of every business’s operations, but that doesn’t mean that it’s something that raises the value of your business. It’s a necessary thing to do, but in that way, every business must be doing it, so the perceived value of accounting and bookkeeping is watered down. It’s like keeping the lights on. Every business needs electricity to run, but it’s not exciting or marketable and it doesn’t set you apart from everyone else. So the people that believe they could never be an accountant or understand how to do their own bookkeeping want you to agree that it’s both necessary and also a waste of your time. There are misconceptions about accounting and bookkeeping, and the people that do them for a career, being boring or not exciting. If you’ve been listening to my podcast for any amount of time, you should probably know by now that my work and my life is anything but boring, much to my chagrin. I have known boring, monotonous people that are accountants. I’ve also known very erratic, wild, off-the-cuff people who are accountants. And then there’s people in the middle. It’s a spectrum of accountants, you see, because we’re people too. Accounting requires math and that makes people anxious. This is kind of a misconception, because while you do need to be able to do simple arithmetic in order to keep a set of books, there’s no high-level math theories or calculus required to manage your financial records. But so many people developed anxiety around math and its complexity and they transfer those feelings to this work, which does involve numbers, addition, multiplication, fractions, etc. However, if you’re listening to this, you are most likely an adult who has accomplished a lot in your life, including probably passing high school level math. And that’s all you need to be capable of doing accounting. Especially for small businesses, whose accounting is not as complex as people seem to think. There is a lot of gatekeeping that happens in my industry of bookkeeping. And that’s why I think so many people assume that they could never do it. The truth is that small business accounting is not that complex, but it has the stigma of requiring high-level thinking and understanding of tax law. Combined with the other four reasons I’ve listed, you wind up with a sentiment of accounting being an exclusive field that few are granted access to understand and perform. Before we move on with how this discourse impacts YOU, let’s pause for a brief message. AD BREAK Let’s talk about the impact that this kind of thinking has on you and your small business. As a business owner, you are the one creating the revenue and transacting and spending money. All the transactions start and end with you, outside of fraudulent charges. But when you say you could never be an accountant or you refuse to “waste” time on understanding your own business finances, you hand over agency and control of your business operations to someone else. That delegation of a very powerful part of your business, the financial data, can have serious consequences. Even if someone were not going to take advantage of your business’s vulnerabilities because you don’t want to understand how bookkeeping and accounting works, you still don’t have access to the information that you need to be useful and grow and achieve your goals. Like we’ve discussed many times before, your financial data can be empowering and understanding it is the only way to reach whatever goals you set in your business. If you listen to people who say that they could never be an accountant, and so they brush off that very necessary part of their business operations as something to be handed over to a third-party, you miss out on making your own financial data very accessible to you. If you are the one transacting in your business, creating revenue, spending money, and watching your reports, then you are the ultimate authority on what is happening in your business. And no third-party accountant will be able to better tell you what it’s like to work in your business every day. We might be able to highlight data for you and point out areas that need your attention, but I cannot guess nor assume what’s going on with your business better than what you can describe from your lived experience. In conclusion, you already know that this is my why: I’m making accounting and bookkeeping for small businesses relatable to the layperson who is running them. My mission at AEA is to increase YOUR financial literacy about your own business. This means giving you the words and tools to describe your business in a way that makes sense to you, but also follows the national guidelines for how we all report our financial data. I help you create systems in your business that supports you. And through all this work, I’m helping you remove, step over, or around, the financial barriers to growing and succeeding in your small business. Because whatever work you are doing in the world is important, and that’s a cause that I can support. But telling yourself that you’re not good at managing money, you’re disorganized, your paperwork is chaotic, and that you don’t know what you are doing is, first of all, not even close to the truth, and second of all, the only thing holding you back from having organized financial systems. So, let’s stop listening to the people who pick on accountants and bookkeepers all of the time as the people who are some clustered, elite group with knowledge that the rest of us can’t access. Let’s stop telling ourselves that this is the one career we could never do. As a business owner, you wear many hats, and I’m here to tell you without preamble that one of those hats is a bookkeeper. I believe that you can do it. And if you want specialized help in creating better systems of financial organization for your small business, you can get on a training on QuickBooks Online with me. That link will be in the show notes for you to get on the schedule. I am now offering the two-hour training in either a single training, or two 60-minute trainings. The price is the same, but some folks wanted the option to split it up. Thanks for listening, make sure you leave me a rating and review for this podcast if you found this information helpful. Be sure to share this episode with your network, and I’ll talk to y’all next week!