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#AccountingDay Monday 11th May 2020

One of the great things about a role as an accountant is that the area of work you actually end up in, or experience throughout your career, can be much broader than you ever imagined. You can be an Accountant, IT consultant, Trainer, Trainee, Confidant, Life Coach and Counsellor all in one day!

An accountant’s role can be exciting: for example working with start-ups, reporting on extremely successful periods of a business’s life and coming up with solutions that the client could never dream of. But it can also be crisis management, dealing with companies that are having to make hard decisions. In essence, your relationship as an accountant with a client can be for life. You can be with them the day they come in, enthusiastic to set up their new company, to go out on their own with their idea, and on up to the day they ask for advice on how to hand it down to their children, and everything that falls in between.

One of the best parts of my training (in my opinion) which was with Eugene Mara & Co. in Maynooth, was from Day One of the three year apprenticeship - being able to sit in on meetings, and listening, hearing someone with years of experience, listen themselves, give advice, communicate to clients of all different ages, experience, at different stages in their business life, and tailoring that advice to the needs and requirements of each client individually, versus giving a one size fits all answer. There is certainly more to accounting than just getting buried in debits and credits and churning out balance sheets and tax returns all day long. It’s not as boring as we sometimes like to let on!

Dave Hickey FCA is an Accountant with Finance Services