Money is both the medium of exchange and a store of value. It is every bit as real as the things it is a proxy for, more real even. In other words, money matters. For now, anyway.
*Accounting rules are often derided for their complexity and excessive discursiveness. I have sympathy for this view. Most accountants do not understand the rules, largely because they are too lazy or indifferent to learn them. If no one but the anoraks who confect these rules understand them, what is the point of them? (The rules, not the anoraks, although also the anoraks.) This is a question I have wrestled with for going on thirty years.
*Forget Marx. If you want to understand capitalism, I mean really understand it, you need to read the complete volume of extant IFRS Accounting Standards. They are actually more accessible than Marx as well. So, yes, it is true they have nothing to say about Hegelian dialectics, but that is not necessarily a bad thing.
*The accounting profession is, very crudely, split into two camps. In one camp, the accountants spend their time either creating rules for businesses to follow or helping businesses to follow them or checking that businesses have followed them. In the other camp, the so-called sexy one, the accountants spend their time analysing how a business has performed or trying to predict how it will perform. The latter camp is where all the cool kids end up. The former camp the social misfits.
*There comes a time in every accountant’s life when they ask themselves the question: what have I become? Only later will they realise that they were always thus.
*The crazy thing is that so much time and effort is spent on ensuring the financial records of an organisation accurately depict its financial reality. Crazy because the numbers an organisation reports - to its shareholders, lenders, trustees or whatever - are always and knowingly at least partially made-up or estimated to use the vernacular. This isn’t the time or the place to burrow into the technicalities (I will save that for my IFRS blog). The essential thing to understand is this: accountants extol the virtue of accuracy out of one side of their face, and the necessity of ambiguity out of the other.
*I am the only middle-aged accountant I know who has visible tattoos. I revel in the petty renegade status they afford me. And the best thing is: no one can openly voice their disapproval because it is now an established tenet of corporate life that we must all bring our authentic selves to work. And this, unfortunately for my colleagues, is my authentic self.