Welcome to 2023! You made it! So happy to see you. Let’s see if anything happened while I was gone last week.
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Wow, nothin’ huh? Alright, this news brief is going to be extra brief I guess.
Deloitte has lowered its UK office temperatures by 2 degrees Celsius (35.6 degrees F) to cut costs and carbon emissions, this is expected to save £75,000 in December. Writes BBC:
Energy costs have soared in the wake of Covid and the invasion of Ukraine.
Deloitte told its 23,000 UK staff that its offices would now be heated to between 19 (66.2 F) and 22C (71.6 F) as part of new energy-saving plans.
It said that the temperature range in its UK offices, while lower, would still be more than the minimum 16C guideline from the Health and Safety Executive for those in desk jobs.
ICYMI: EY had the worst PCAOB inspection it’s had since 2018.
An HR magazine stroked PwC off about its mental health initiatives.
Since it’s so dead, today you get to hear about a new accounting services office that was just opened in Delaware. That’s how little is going on today.
The Rehoboth Beach-Dewey Beach Chamber of Commerce held a ribbon cutting Dec. 14 to celebrate the opening of the new Steve Falcone CPA office at 17662 Beaver Dam Road, Lewes.
Steve Falcone has been preparing taxes since starting out door-to-door at age 19 with a clipboard, pencil and calculator in hand. Some 40 years later, with so much of life and work online, Falcone said he still loves his work and helping others.
Steve is an inspiration to us all. Moving on…
For the accounting firm leaders out there, Accounting Today has a list of 12 things you should do this year. Here’s January:
Make sure you have enough potential new clients in there to provide enough revenue to cover your growth goals (and remember to add a little to cover client attrition) and that you have the right mix of ideal clients by service offering. Finally, be sure that you’re tracking how often and how you’ve “touched” each prospect, so that you can review your progress throughout the year.
My favorite is April:
Don’t tell anyone how hard tax season used to be, or how hard it is, or how hard it’s going to be. In fact, don’t ever tell anyone how hard things were or are or will be. The profession has a bad reputation as a place where people work way too much and have no work-life balance, and a lot of that is driven by veteran accountants humble-bragging about how bad they’ve had it.
YEAH SHUT UP ABOUT BUSY SEASON ALREADY, YOU’RE SCARING PEOPLE AWAY.
Also from Accounting Today, a must-read from my friend and all around amazing woman Amber Setter on the pipeline shortage and why not enough people are talking about how to support those individuals who are bravely traversing their way through that pipeline NOW.
Our solutions remain hyperfocused on the future. The CPA Evolution initiative and promotion of the accounting profession are noble endeavors, but it will take years to see the returns on these investments. Sorely missing from the conversation is the lack of support for those who are already in it.
Initial candidates for CPA licensure have embarked on the journey to pass the exam. They committed to meeting the educational requirements of their respective state boards and submitted applications to sit for the exam. They study and take exam sections between peak periods of work. They pay the requisite fees and wait for numerous agencies to communicate with one another.
They’re frustrated at the outdated infrastructure of those agencies. They don’t know why they can’t pay for exam fees using Venmo. (Believe it or not, some state boards still require candidates to physically mail in a check.) They don’t understand why computerized exam scores cannot be released immediately and are flabbergasted when exam scores aren’t released on time. They wait upwards of 30 days to receive exam scores while working in a profession that has minimal downtime. The 18-month deadline continuously looms.
As for what we’re working on today, couldn’t tell ya. Catching up on emails to start, then I have to go see if anyone did anything embarrassing at this year’s firm holiday parties.
I leave you with these half-assed, half-baked predictions for accounting in 2022 penned by GC founding editor Caleb Newquist last year. Did any of it come true?
The prescience! Who could have foreseen the accounting profession hyping overhyped “next gen” technology that doesn’t actually change any of the things it claims it is changing?
At the bottom of Caleb’s now-ancient predictions there’s also this bit on the accountant shortage, which we will no doubt repeat in 2023:
It’s funny because the accounting profession seems to have forgotten that it has an immediate perpetual problem: finding accountants who want to work in accounting firms. And there’s no solution to it, as far as I can see, especially if, at the very least, most firms are going to try strong-arming people back into the office.
So, prediction: All year long, we’ll be seeing articles in Accounting Today and every other accounting trade with the profession’s leaders offering advice on winning the battle for talent. And most of it won’t even be bad advice. It will center on firms providing a more flexible, inclusive, and dynamic workplace. It’s a proven approach by many companies all over the world. But most accounting firms won’t listen.
Same as last year.
Now get back to work!
