The Social Accountant

Have you ever thought what it would be like to say ‘no’? I don’t mean, no to an occasional request, but, to say no to any and all requests? What happens when we push the boundaries that makes the social convention, nay, the social behemoth churn, and we turn it upside down? Lucky for you, I will do the thinking on your behalf and surmise the scenarios that make up that situation. Your job? Read, understand and judge. If that is too hard, then I kindly ask you to go jump *in front* of a bridge. **The Social Accountant** In the world of accounting, the debits should never be more than the credits and the credits better not hold back anything from the debits. If either scenario should happen, it is the role of the accountant to find out why, and then, summarily beat that scenario to death so that it never dares to lift its unbalanced head. Now that we understand what the role of an accountant is, now we need to look at the type of people who dream to be accountants. *The Irregulars* These folk are just not normal. *The money on my mind* All the see is money. Little do they know that the money they see is someone else’s, they are paid in Ks but all they dream is about those Ms. *Right is right and wrong should be right* Innate belief that everything should be balanced and the endless stream of the Ds and Cs act as soothing lullabies to their weary minds. In some ways, they are the best accountants, however, they are boring, so let’s stop talking about them. *The FP & A* Wanted to be an accountant, before realizing what accounting was. Tells everyone they work in Finance when they don’t, and never mention they may be an accountant, but since they deal with a budget or forecast, believe themselves to be not. These creatures are truly the social accountant. An accountant embarrassed to be called an accountant, but will tell anyone willing to hear them that they are in Finance and that is not accounting. Now that we have a good understanding of who our target for our painstaking psycho analysis is, let’s begin. In the world of the Social Accountant, there are two things that stand out. Whether the weekly, monthly, quarterly, and dare I say the yearly results are negative i.e. ooopsie or positive, i.e. I won’t be yelled at today. You see, the accountants are the ones that determine what the final number is, however it is the Social Accountant that goes around screaming at the top of their bolded letters neatly arranged in some excel worksheet or PowerPoint what those results mean. They go person to person sometimes in hierarchy of power, sometimes in absolute confusion and point to numbers and try to justify why that number is what it is. What the social accountant never does is say **no**. It turns out that I chose the wrong person to do the detailed analysis on. Ooopsie.