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I need to rant about timesheets. I have lost so much sleep because of them, and they have done a great job in completely destroying my self esteem and imposing an unnecessary amount of mental load.
For those of you not in the know, here's a rundown of how internal budgeting in public accounting usually works: A fixed fee is quoted on the engagement letter to the client, which is ostensibly supposed to be based on the amount of time the job took during previous years. As a public accountant you have an internal hourly rate, and when you fill out your timesheet the hours you've taken on a job get multiplied by that rate. The resulting amount is called a WIP, and that is compared against the bill to see if the job was over or under budget. The percentage of hours spent that are actually billed is called "realisation".
In theory it's just meant to be a measure of the actual amount of time it takes to perform the task so people know if they're pricing properly, and if there is out-of-scope work the additional billing will be estimated based on the extra time recorded in the timesheet. In practice? It gets used as a measure of individual efficiency and will impact judgements of employee performance - which doesn't make much sense considering that employees do not get paid overtime in public accounting but are getting punished for booking their overtime because opportunity cost. To make this even more comically sadistic, you're expected to book a specific number of hours per week, and there's also yet another metric that gets used to evaluate employees: utilisation, which is the percentage of time that you actually spent doing productive work - so you can't book a lot of your work hours to admin and get away with it. The budgets, along with the utilisation requirements, often results in there being an incentive to work huge amounts of overtime and book only the normal hours (eating hours) so both realisation and utilisation can look peachy. Often these targets get put on the managers and that pressure trickles down to employees.
A new employee that doesn't really play the timesheet game will often end up with sizeable writeoffs on many of their jobs. I have a mere 1.5 years of experience in tax proper (note most tax accountants did not, in fact, study a whole lot of tax and are usually picking it all up on the job), and I can say the work that reaches you can be highly heterogenous. There's a lot of self-learning involved and a lot of time spent just doing that. In addition, you are also juggling a lot of clients and handling a good amount of client communications to the point you are expected to hound them repeatedly to respond to requests for information or to sign the tax returns you've provided them like idiot children, which means you're being split between many different tasks and you lose a lot of time because this task-switching imposes a serious mental load.
If you're confused on a technical topic you're expected to ask questions, but people are often busy enough that the answer you get is never very helpful. If you half-ass jobs due to the lack of guidance you receive, you'll receive snarky review points in your workpaper, and if you attempt to make your jobs highly technically accurate (something I did), that takes time and requires a large amount of unpaid overtime from you - but you will get penalised for it if you actually record it. Another aspect that makes this even worse is that tax and accounting software used in many firms is hilariously finicky and takes a while to sort out, which inflates actual time spent even further - but higher-ups tend to be distanced enough from such preparation that they underestimate how much time troubleshooting it actually takes. Oh also sometimes you can be within budget but underutilised through no fault of your own because the firm just does not have enough work at a certain point in the year, and be criticised for not doing enough.
In other words, timekeeping in many public accounting firms is a lose/lose/lose situation. Charge your hours and go over budget? Managers complain about blowing the budget and being inefficient. Charge your hours and come in under budget? Managers complain that your utilisation has gone to shit. Charge inaccurate hours to make sure you don't come off as inefficient or underutilised? Well the number is all fake anyway, so why track hours in the first place? Timekeeping ends up being a pointless part of the job, a metric that can be optimised for greatest manager and partner satisfaction, but provides zero actual value. You're not supposed to eat time, but you're supposed to come in under budget and if you don't you will be called in and given review points. Great. I had a complaint just yesterday which included the fact that my total productive hours were higher than expected for the year and I was blowing budgets on jobs - which means the obvious solution is not to book any of these hours spent doing work. In my view it shouldn't matter as long as you bill enough per month - the actual billings don't change regardless of what you decide to put on the timesheet, and neither does your pay, but they treat their ridiculous metrics as Divinely Ordained Truth. Nobody will acknowledge how stupid this entire system is, and will expect you to play along.
God the culture sucks. Maybe I have a bad attitude, but I've long stopped caring about how accurate anything on my timesheet is. I'm seriously considering updating my resume, applying for a couple of jobs - in industry, not public - and handing in my two weeks notice as soon as I have another offer.
I've been there
Just do this. Just make your boss happy. The best part about timesheets being fake is you don't even need to worry about it. Every Friday just do a vibes based analysis of your work that week, ensuring that 1) you hit utilization and 2) you weight your hours towards the biggest files so no one gets mad about going over budget
So many things in large bureaucratic organizations are stupid wastes of time. So just play the game, fly under the radar, and the second you make senior or manager retire to industry.
Also warning, tax departments at large dinosaur(ish) corporations like telecoms are incredibly burnt. You won't have much to do and you'll be bored out of your mind. Great if you want kids though.
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