Esteemed philosopher Tony Soprano once said, “It's good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that, I know. But lately, I'm getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.”

I know the feeling. I spent years building a career in something I genuinely loved, watching it get harder to see a future in it. The best people were leaving. The work that mattered kept getting crowded out by work that didn't.

I regret to inform you, dear reader, that while cooler people like Jalen Brunson were born to play basketball, I was born to be an accountant.

When I was five years old, my mother panicked. A friend was over at my house and our moms got lost in conversation when they realized that we had disappeared, and worse yet, an entire jar of M&Ms was gone! I’m talking about one of those mega jars, the kind so big that you eat like 50, realize there’s still 90% of the jar left, and then put it on a shelf and forget about it. Absolute potential disaster for 5 year olds.

The moms found us upstairs in my bedroom, certain that the boys were about to be on a crazy sugar rush. What they found when they opened the door was that we were not on a sugar rush, but an accounting rush. My friend and I did not eat a single M&M —  instead, we were meticulously sorting the entire jar by color and counting them. We both became CPAs.

While this may sound cute, this is extremely embarrassing for me. It’d be one thing if it were just a funny childhood story, but it’s another when you consider that my Soul spark moment was literally for accounting. That’s deranged! Historically I’ve tried to play it cool, because who would ever want to be friends with someone who actually loves accounting? I worked in audit and industry-side for several years each, and typically just said “yes” when family and friends asked if I worked in tax. I almost never said or explained the depth of terms like “audit” or “financial reporting at a public REIT,” just the all-encompassing “accounting.”

There is nobility in accounting. It is the world’s (second!) oldest profession, made apparent by the fact that the first written artifacts we have are cuneiform accounting records. We’ve always known that we need to understand what we owe and own. Accounting is less about numbers and more about taking the things that happen in real life and turning them into a system of record. 

The biggest misconception about accounting is that it is an exact science, when really it’s more of an art. Sure, there are thousands of pages of very specific rules (affectionately known as “guidance”) on how to record pretty much any and every single action a person (or a machine) can take. But having been in both audit rooms and board rooms, I can tell you that these authoritative rules are not really, well, authoritative.

The real world is complicated. Really complicated. So as exhaustive and thorough as guidance can be, it can never fully account for the specific context of every business scenario. This means that real accounting isn’t about just mechanically applying rules. It is about applying judgment based on experience and truly trying to understand a particular situation. Accounting is about critical thinking.

That’s why accounting can be really thrilling. It is a high-stakes game of navigating business needs, giving accurate and legal representations of reality to investors and the government, often under crushing deadlines. 

When people say “accounting is the language of business,” this is the rush they’re referring to. This type of work will take you across an entire company - from boardrooms to supply closets, into the depths of payroll and into the weeds of legal documents. My favorite times as an accounting professional have allowed me to work with my colleagues within our zone of genius and provide actual value. I am able to be a steward of the company and the profession — a craftsman and a stakeholder. The catch is that in order to provide that value, accountants first have to stay on top of more menial work.

This thing of ours is ancient, so I had no delusions about being on the ground floor of something. But lately, like Tony Soprano, many newcomers to the profession have feared that they are getting in at the end. 

As I progressed in my audit career, I noticed a decline in prestige and community. The partner track seemed more and more distant — people got promoted less frequently and took more years on average to become “made.” There was less trust between clients and firms. Teams were often tied up in disagreements that amounted to something like, “Your interpretation of this is frustrating, perhaps another firm will have a different opinion, or at least will give us the same frustration for less money.” Managers and partners were forced to spend less time providing real value to their clients and more time ticking boxes and tying out run-of-the-mill invoices and financial statements. 

When I moved from an accounting firm to an in-house role, I found myself on a different side of the same coin. It could take several months to find a single quality accounting candidate. Even executive management and upper level CPAs had to step in to help teams keep up with granular, day-to-day transactions. This throttled our bandwidth — instead of being able to use accounting data to make optimal business decisions in real time, we were bogged down with elementary work. 

This blockage has stagnated salaries and increased employee workloads, which in turn has created a widening gap in the cost-benefit analysis of becoming a CPA at all. Quality candidates realized they might be better off in consulting or finance and followed suit. Firms are struggling to hire engaged accountants, threatening the apprenticeship model that has served the profession since time immemorial. We’re left with fewer accountants, all of whom are expected to do more grunt work. It is harder than ever for experts to devote quality time to research, nuance, and actionable opinion.

I was feeling myself become more like the stereotypical accountant, finicky and pencil pushing, the longer I stayed. So I thought: It’d be good to get in on the ground floor. That’s what brought me to Basis. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the people here view accounting the same way that I do. They do not see accounting as simple or easy to automate. They see a nuanced profession that has a desperate need for help.

Despite the deep necessity of the accounting profession, we may as well still be using abaci to support us in processing transactions and research. The industry is behind, but it can still catch up with tools like Basis. Basis builds agents that perform real accounting work. You can run many jobs simultaneously and Basis will autonomously complete significant preparation work for month-end close, audit, tax, and more. We say that Basis is like having a team of senior accountants at your disposal 24/7, and it is no coincidence that this empowers accountants to lean more heavily into the creative, engaging accounting work that gives us our spark — reviewing, researching, and providing expert value and perspective. It was here that I bought into what Basis was selling. Basis understands that the equation that really matters for today’s accountants is not Assets = Liabilities + Equity; it is that Time - Menial Work = Time for value-driven work, and the profession is in the negative.

I invite my fellow accounting professionals (and I know that many of us are skeptical because I myself was just a short time ago) to think seriously about Basis and products like it. If you have an odd passion for sorting M&Ms and treating accounting as an art, join me as a steward of positive change for our industry. Whether you want to help build these tools or reap the benefits of them, we all have a real opportunity to invest in our profession while being at the forefront of technological ingenuity. It’s been a long time since you could say that to an accountant.

If you might be interested in joining us at Basis, check out our careers page.