Dear Future Accountant,
I’m Roy, a Dagenham boy through and through and this is my story on how I became an accountant!
I went to a normal school and to be quite honest, I never thought of becoming an accountant. Like many boys, I wanted to be a footballer, but I wasn’t amazing at it. I was good at maths, so accountancy was an attractive job and a friend of mine started to work for an accountancy firm in Barking and a job came up, so I took it. After finishing my A levels, the idea of university just wasn’t appealing to me, but the accounting firm I started working for decided to put me through college, even though I had no real interest in studying.
Degrees are not vital if you are interested in becoming an accountant but being good at maths and english is necessary. Additionally, there are some key soft skills that allow you to thrive in this career path. These are:
- Being analytical
- Being a good communicator
- Being a rounded individual
- Being patient, in this industry, there are so many changes.
Before entering the accountancy profession, I wish that I was a more patient person because I undermined how much things do change. I also wish that I qualified earlier and had taken the job more seriously from the beginning. I feared getting things wrong a lot of the time, I wish I could go back and tell myself that it is okay to get things wrong and that mistakes are a vital part of learning.
In terms of accountancy qualifications, I did my AAT and after that, I stopped studying for a long time, which means it did end up taking me a while to become a qualified accountant. I would say that I was lucky because I worked for Raffingers for a long time, but it wasn’t until I settled down and started a family that I got my head down and studied in the early hours of the morning because I had a child and my wife pushed me to finish my studies.
The job itself is extremely rewarding there is no denying that, but the most rewarding thing for me is helping my clients. I enjoy speaking to clients and that is honestly what keeps me going. Being a Partner is great because each day is never the same! I’m a counselor one day and then an advisor the next. Accountancy is very advisory-based now, more so than ever before and a huge part of the advisory work we do is supported by the cloud accounting team.
When becoming an accountant, you will have the choice of working for industry (accountants working in industry often focus on the economics within a specific business including cash flow, cost control, and budgeting) or practice, (Raffingers is a practice). I have fortunately had experience in both, and I would say that working in industry first and foremost gives you a lot of commercial awareness and that going from industry to practice has made me a better accountant in general. I would recommend future accountants to gain work experience in both practice and industry and get a feel for the two.
At Raffingers we have a beneficial mentorship program that helps new employees immensely. When I started at Raffingers, I worked closely with two of the partners here, Gary and Barry. All the partners here are supportive and working for Raffingers is great, to this day each partner mentors me in some way. Funnily enough, I mentor people when they don’t want to be mentored, I always enjoy giving advice.
Accountancy can be a tough job at times, but it is so rewarding. If you have a good team around you, you will get through the day. Raffingers is very different from a lot of other firms. One of the biggest nuggets of wisdom I can share is that it's crucial to understand how good you have got it when you have a good employer and stick with them.
Roy Butcher,
Partner
Find out more about our culture, current vacancies and how you can join our team here. To hear the career journeys and gain advice from the other partners here at Raffingers please click here!