Chartered Accountant (CA) - As a career option

“Money, money, money…it’s a rich man’s world.”-  ABBA and where there’s money, there’s a CA trying to find a way to:

• Hide it from the government (for wealthy individuals).
• Manage it properly so that you know how much of it you have, and where it’s tied up (for organizations).
• Calculate if the amount paid by the citizens as taxes is as much as it should be (the government).

Chartered Accountants, to put it simply, manage money. They keep a track of where it’s coming from and going to when it’s coming and going, and even how the movements are happening (cash, online, cheque…)

They help prepare budgets, pay taxes, make sure all compliance are met with (for individuals as well as corporations), assist with the legal and accounting aspect of complex business situations like Mergers and Acquisitions, or valuations for fund-raising, and even prepare statements that show the financial situation of an entity (Profit and Loss Statement, Cash Flow Statement, Balance Sheet, etc).

Eligibility Criteria to Become a Chartered Accountant

• +2: Students should be from Commerce Stream with 60% aggregate
• Bachelor’s: It’s a Professional degree that requires completing a three-level program prescribed by The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India to qualify (CPT, IPCC, CA-Finals)

To professionally practice as an accountant, you need to clear the three-tier CA exams laid out by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India, which takes a total period of 4-5 years, and includes three years as a paid article (an intern of sorts) with a practicing accountant (individual, or a firm).

It is a distance-learning course (you do not attend a college, although most students do take coaching classes, which are not mandatory), and extremely gruelling.

What Subjects to Focus While Studying For Chartered Accountant (CA)

1. Accounting and Financial Reporting
2. Taxation (Direct, and Indirect)
3. Financial Management (Raising funds, managing funds, etc)

Career Prospects of Chartered Accountant (CA)

• Have a private practice, where he is the partner and works alone, or with other partners, to provide accounting or taxation services.
• Work in a consulting firm, like Ernst & Young and Price Water house, where he will be responsible for assisting their clients in authenticating their financial statements and reports.
• Work as a Finance Associate / Manager / Chief Financial Officer in a corporation.

The roles, lifestyles and salaries are very different in all three scenarios. Within accounting itself, there are sub-niches in management accounting (where an overall strategy point of view is taken), cost accounting (where the cost of an item or a service is derived at), and financial accounting (where financial statements for an entity are maintained).

Some CAs also prefer to add on further degrees and diploma courses (Financial Risk Management, Masters in Business Administration, Chartered Financial Analyst, etc) that might help them become experts in a specific field.

The degree is an extremely prestigious one, highly valued in society, for the sheer amount of hard work and grit it takes to earn it. As a CA, you will be extremely confident with all money related matters throughout your life - be it calculating the E Mi's on your home loan, or understand the latest Government budgets.

You will also be adept at quick calculations, thanks to the large rows of numbers all CA's deal with.

A Day in the Life of a Chartered Accountant (CA)

Hi there. Lucky I caught you on my lunch break, although at almost 5:00 PM, I’m not sure it even qualifies as lunch any more.

As you know, I work as an Assurance Executive in one of the Big 4’s, as our companies are commonly known. I am mainly responsible for checking the books and ledgers of other Fortune 500 companies and make sure they comply with all rules and standards laid down for reporting, by our own ICAI, as well as international bodies.

The idea is to make sure that there are no discrepancies in the financial picture reported by this company, and our signature at the end of their reports acts as that proof. The legal word for us is an “Auditor”.

Governments, shareholders, investors, and other stakeholders use our signature as a vote of confidence in that company and act accordingly.

We sometimes do make mistakes (one of the biggest accounting and consulting firms was the auditor of Satyam Technologies, wherein they missed that the CEO had included 7000 fake invoices into the company's computer system to record sales that simply did not exist. The consequences were not pretty, let me tell you).

Anyway, I digress. Would you like to know how my day went?

8:00 AM: Wake up. If you’re wondering why this late, it’s because I didn’t reach home until 3 am from work last night. Of course, my mother was glad I came home at all, unlike the previous night, when we decided to put sleeping beds in the cabin itself.

8:05 AM: Quickly check work mail to see if there have been any emails from my Engagement Manager or Partner. None. Of course, they’d probably went to bed a lot earlier, and hadn’t even woken up by now.

9:00 AM: Having a hurried breakfast while waiting for the cab. Client pings: the actuary’s report on the HR figures I’d requested is at my desk. I needed to run a few numbers to make sure that the salaries and leave encashment reported in last year’s P&L is accurate.

10:00 AM: Reach office. My engagement manager is late, as always. The article who works with me has class in the morning, so he probably won’t get in before 11. Oh, well, I’ll make a dent on the report in front of me.

1:00 AM: Office boy gets in with fancy green tea for me, as well as a few snacks. One good thing about working as an auditor: the client lives to pamper you, lest you complicate things for them, and the audit report turns out less than perfect.

12:00 AM: Manager and article get in together. I answer a few questions about the progress done so far and set up an appointment with the HR head to discuss a few figures that aren’t adding up correctly.

2:00 PM: Meeting with HR manager ends. She has no idea what is going on – the accounting for all of their branches happens at the head office, while each branch has a separate HR resource. Things are a mess.

2:30 PM: I sit down on the laptop and open our company accounting software, looking up last year’s files in the database. Lucky for us, we’d audited this company the previous year as well, so maybe that will give me some clarity.

3:30 PM: Still confused, I call up the Project Manager who handled this issue the previous year. She’s busy, and takes time to recall the issue, but has an immediate fix. Lucky me!

4:30 PM: Update the issue on our software, wrap up that head, and order lunch from a nearby expensive restaurant. The client pays for all food, hooray!

5:00 PM: It’s September, which means lunches at 5 pm, if at all. September is one of the busiest seasons for our firm because it marks the end of half the financial year, which means returns are due, taxes are due, and lots and lots of reporting.

6:00 PM: Came back from lunch and a brisk walk, and the Partner assigned to this project calls me for a review. He has some issues marked on the accounting heads I’ve worked on in the previous month.

I walk him through the work done, clarify his questions, and try to do a better job reflecting my assumptions and thought processes in the files so that anyone looking at the excel can clearly see what happened.

9:00 PM: The Partner finally hung up, and left me a long list of suggested changes, to be sent in tonight before leaving. I know she won’t be checking it until a couple of days later, but orders are orders.

10:00 PM: Order dinner, and bitch about our life with colleagues.

2:00 AM: Wrap up the Leave Encashment excel, recheck all comments from the Partner are resolved and book a cab to head home.

What a crazy life! Do you want to be like me? Are you interested in pursuing this profession? Do you want to know more about it?

Have your say in the comment box below! Enjoy Reading!