A typical accountant starts their morning be receiving the daily goals from the senior accountant or the business manager. In fact, you might be the only financially trained person on your team if you work in a small company or a start-up! While not yet a fully accredited accountant, you will dedicate your day to crunching numbers and presenting them in a digestible fashion to key decision-makers that run your department (maybe even the whole company).

Keeping systematic records of business transactions is the responsibility of accounting technicians, as they are responsible for verifying and logging business transactions.

Your first task may be to double-check an invoice that doesn’t appear to have been paid on time by one of your employer’s clients. Checking the bank account, you see that they actually did pay, but it was two months late. Interest accrued in that time, so you need to communicate this oversight to the team leader or the account manager. One of them will be able to resolve the issue, but late payments and interest are sensitive conversations. The interest may be waived to preserve the client relationship, but that’s why you recommended that your business manager price her projects to account for situations like these. They will need to get back to them on that one.

A new invoice landed on your desk yesterday that you can review now… it’s a steady client that has always paid the invoices on time, but they are now moving to a new location within the same city. You just need to update the billing address on your client database, send a quick confirmation email to the client to verify the new address, and then a brief notice to the other employees who work with that client. Nobody wants to repeat that one incident where a bill went unpaid for three months because it went to an old address!

Since it’s February, tax season will be upon everyone shortly. That 11:00 am meeting was cancelled at the last minute, so you decide to get a head start on preparing the company’s tax records for the April deadline. Thank the stars that your boss agreed to buy Sage’s accounting software last year—it’s freed up more time than you realized you had!

After lunch, your co-worker asks you what you think of the new guy in the office, and you remember that you need to set up his information in the payroll system. He gladly fills out the form and hands you a voided cheque so that you can enter his banking information for direct deposits. It’s his first job—better make a mental note to explain how tax brackets and employer contributions work so that he doesn’t get upset by the deductions we all see on our bi-weekly pay cheques!

After some afternoon meetings, you refocus on your long-term goal to become a fully chartered accountant. The certification test is still a few months away, but that’s no excuse to put off studying. You mark it in your schedule and write up a to-do list for yourself tomorrow before leaving so that you can jump right into the fray without losing your momentum.

It’s all in a day’s work for an accounting technician. Learn how to become one through Eastern’s Accounting Technician program to put your career on track!

Visit our Accounting & Payroll Administrator program page to learn about accounting and payroll. Check out our Accounting & Payroll (Online) option to gain the flexibility of learning from home at your own pace.