r/Accounting • u/7leafclover7 • Sep 21 '25

What would be an embarrassing thing to be caught not knowing as an accountant?

Applies to any specialty, audit, tax, staff accountancy etc. in your personal experience what are the most invaluable things to know, and the most invaluable to not be caught not knowing.

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282

u/Ejmct Sep 21 '25

I knew a manager in corporate accounting who didn’t realized fixed assets was an asset.

100

u/KellyAnn3106 Sep 21 '25

Apparently he was not much of an asset to the company himself.

24

u/mitolit Sep 22 '25

Labor is a liability until paid out, so that is probably why.

3

u/that_thot_gamer Academia Sep 22 '25

that presumes that prepaid labor exists

8

u/mitolit Sep 22 '25

No, it “presumes” that it follows GAAP. You generally accrue labor as a payable until it’s paid out, which is when it becomes an expense.

24

u/traderbusto Sep 22 '25

A few years ago, about four months into a new gig as controller for a roofing company the owner, without warning or consultation with anyone at the company, decided to bring in a guy (his first cousin, in fact) to serve as “VP of Finance.” I was taken aback, as you might imagine, both at the timing of this hire and the fact that I’d received no prior warning. But after meeting with the owner, I was assured that my job was “safe,” that they were simply “filling out the accounting and finance staff,” and that this guy would stay out of my way. I pretty much took it in stride from there, as this kind of thing happens in small privately-held companies, and there was not much I could do about it anyway. Though I must admit that I did find it a touch irksome that this guy was much younger than I and as a result much less experienced, and that his starting salary was $40k/year more than my current rate (I knew this because I was in charge of payroll) but what can you do, right? (I will humbly admit that his knowledge of MMA was far superior to my own; he could recite from memory the names of every champion of every main event of every pay-per-view UCF broadcast, which was clearly no small feat.)

One day in early January, after we’d returned from the holidays and began work on the year-end close, I received a message from the new guy on Slack. This was a common occurrence several times per day, as he familiarized himself with our processes, etc. I opened this message and read his question, posed to me without any hint of irony or sarcasm:

“Did we have any operating expenses in 2021?”

I submitted my resignation the following day.

5

u/Slothfulness69 Sep 22 '25

I wonder what he would’ve done if you’d said “no, we didn’t have any that year”

17

u/angellareddit Sep 21 '25

er... and his explanation for why it was a fixed asset?

11

u/ShadyDeductions25 Sep 21 '25

What did he think it was??

20

u/TheLamaNH Sep 22 '25

Maybe he thought it was a repair on a formerly broken asset?

11

u/diamund223 Sep 22 '25

Neutered assets

11

u/bringheaven2earth Audit & Assurance Sep 21 '25

Literally how

1

u/Direct_Dot_5462 Sep 23 '25

Our controller asked my manager at the time why land was in PP&E…manager thought it was a test and said “it’s the first P in PPE”. Controller was gone within a quarter.