Accounting Addiction

 

Heard at an accounting support group: “It seemed so harmless. I started making journal entries..then, secretly at home, I would post the entries to T accounts, and then I started recording them in ledgers. It just felt so good, and then I started doing financial statements and I couldn’t stop…”

 

 

Senior Partner

An accountant goes into a pet shop to buy a parrot. The shop owner shows him three identical parrots on a perch and says, “The parrot on the left costs $500.” “Why does that parrot cost so much?” asks the accountant. “Well,” replies the owner, “it knows how to do complex audits.” “How much does the middle parrot cost?” asks the accountant. “That one costs $1,000 because it can do everything the first one can do plus it knows how to prepare financial forecasts”. The startled accountant asks about the third parrot, to be told it costs $4,000. Needless to say, this begs the question, “What can it do?” To which the owner replies “To be honest, I’ve never seen him do a darn thing, but the other two call him Senior Partner.”

 

In Pictures

 

Generally Accepted Accounting Principles

 

Correct Measure

 On a sunny afternoon three accountants are standing near a tall pole and wondering about the height of the pole. First accountant, a CPA says, I do not think there is any authoritative guidance on how measure the height of a pole, that is not the job of accountants. Second accountant, a professor at a state university says, well, if we take a survey of similar locations and asked people about the height of poles, then we may be able to deduce height of this pole, it will be a good enough estimate. The third accountant is a professor at an Ivy league university. He confidently claims, if we measure the shadow of the pole under different conditions, then I can run a multivariate regression model and can give a very good estimate of the height. As this conservation is going on, an engineer is passing by, he stops and asks about their discussion. Accountants tell him, you probably can not understand this complex problem. The engineer persists and hears about the problem. He smiles, lifts the pole from the base, measures it, and says, “twelve feet and three inches,” and walks off. Accountants look at him, laugh contemptuously and say in unison – “hell, we wanted to know the height of the pole and he tells us the length.”

 

Reincarnation

An Indian Accountant’s Theory of Reincarnation – if you are a good accountant, virtuous accountant, then you are reborn as an engineer. But if you are evil, wicked accountant, you are reborn as a psychologist.

 

Underlying Assumptions

One day in microeconomics, the professor was writing up the typical “underlying assumptions” in preparation to explain a new model. I turned to my friend and asked, “What would Economics be without assumptions?” He thought for a moment, then replied, “Accounting.”