One of the most annoying things about accounting is having to make sure everything balances. Whether it's $50,000 or a few cents, it all has to be accounted for.
While entering data from my spreadsheets into other spreadsheets, I encountered this problem: there was an entire 12 cents missing. 12 whole cents! It might not seem important, but if you're being paid to keep track of someone's money, you better be keeping track of it. It took me over an hour to figure out where this 12 cents was and why it wasn't balancing out. I had to re-check all the numbers I entered into the spreadsheet, which is difficult when you have to keep switching between tabs (which is why most of the people I work with have 2 screens).
Eventually I was able to find the 12 cents: there was a plan for an employee within the company that was with a different financial institution, so his account wasn't in my first spreadsheet with all the account data, but it was already accounted for in the balance sheet. This account earned, wait for it, a whopping 12 cents in dividends the entire year! This just goes to show how time consuming it can be to account for money that really doesn't even matter and nobody cares about (sorry penny, but let's face it, all you're good for is scraping the silver stuff off a lottery ticket).
So I know from watching some of the people in AP Computer Science that there are coding programs that check for inconsistencies between lines. Is there anything similar for accountants?- And how would one even go about making one for such work?
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