Stuff Accountants Like

While accountants are known workaholics, the time charged for work doesn’t reflect this if they are in public accounting. While an accountant may routinely work 12 hour plus days, they may only charge 9 hours. This is known as eating hours and is done to maintain the illusion of efficiency.

Let’s be clear that eating hours is wrong and may be illegal. Accountants, like many professions, are under immense amounts of pressure due to time and money. Specifically, there is not enough time nor money. Accountants pride themselves on their work and are given a small fraction of the time needed to do a proper job.

How does everything work with a budget of 4 hours and a realistic timeline requiring 16 hours? Answer: eating hours. It allows accountants to overwork and appear to only have worked a few hours. The extra time spent working is simply ignored as if it never occurred. This maintains the illusion of efficiency.

As one of the foundations of public accounting, eating hours will not go away anytime soon. It’s simply not possible when you are given 8 hours for equity (at a public company, which includes memos, testwork, and clearing comments) to stay within the budget. As each quarter/year/fiscal cycle passes, the alloted time for budgets manages to further shrink.

Tags: #8, Eating Hours