I'm supposed to do 40 hours of accounting-related professional development training a year, and now that all of my work is self-employed and no one is willing to subsidise any of that training, I'm always on the lookout for cost-effective ways to comply. A newspaper brochure for The Great Courses on sale prompted me to give one a try.

I picked " ( Read more... )

It's been a while since I posted about anything other than Supernatural!

( General personal update )

I'm halfway through a two day residential course at a hotel in Mandurah on running an accounting firm, something I have no plans to do. Attending the course is a prerequisite for a license I'm supposed to have, even though it isn't very relevant to my situation. When I enrolled, I was kind of looking forward to spending a couple of days at a hotel ( Read more... )

I'm taking a postgrad accounting unit called Practice Management this semester, since it's one of the prerequisites for getting a license to operate as the principal of an accounting firm. That isn't something I think I want to do, but you're supposed to have this license even to work for yourself as a sole practitioner, which I've been doing on a ( Read more... )

I'm so glad it's the Christmas gathering today and I have a good excuse not to do 17 hours of accounting, like I've done with every other free day for the last two weeks. Up until yesterday I was really enjoying it (the thrill of the deadline!), but the gloss wore off yesterday morning and it was a hard slog for the rest of the day ( Read more... )

Last week's 1000 column spreadsheet job has carried on, now encompasses many different reports for five separate accounting periods, and has almost entirely consumed my week. I've been working closely with another accounting contractor I've never met and we've exchanged emails pretty much continuously from 5am until after midnight every day, except ( Read more... )

Right after I posted the other day someone called and offered me some work constructing financial accounts for a company that went broke a couple of years ago, if I could do it ASAP. The receivers (who manage a broke company's assets to try to get the best return for creditors, which may mean immediately selling off its assets or continuing to run ( Read more... )

Work at New Job has dried up due to the lack of success of their main project. They may still want me to do bits here and there, but October to January is the quietest time of the year in my field, so there probably won't be much for a while ( Read more... )

I'm still having an almost unconscionably good time with my year-end accounting work. I've become much better at working from home this year, in particular at figuring out the right amount of effort to put in for the results available. Double-checking is good, triple- and quadruple-checking absorbs all my free time for virtually no value to the ( Read more... )

I've just got home from work at 9:30pm on a Friday night and, since things will probably go downhill next week when the auditors start debating everything I've done, want to record what a great day I had and how much I love my work life. I am so lucky to have fallen into a profession I enjoy and at which I can make a good living, at least partly on ( Read more... )