Finance & accounting · Organizing & Managing
Accountant: what the job actually is
Making sure a business's numbers are true, explaining what they mean, and being the person who notices the thing that does not add up.
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The work
What this job actually is
- Recording what happened to a business in money, accurately enough that somebody can make a decision or file a return on the strength of it.
- Then the more interesting half: explaining it. The numbers are useless until somebody who does not read spreadsheets understands what they are being told.
- A lot of reconciliation — two records that should agree and do not, and finding out why. People either find this satisfying or unbearable, and there is not much middle ground.
- Deadlines that do not move. Month-end, year-end, filing dates. Busy season in public practice is genuinely heavy, for weeks at a time.
- Increasingly, less data entry and more judgement. Software does the recording; you are paid for knowing what it means, what is wrong with it, and what to do about it.
A Tuesday
What a normal day looks like
Not a good day or a bad one. The ordinary version, which is what you would actually be living.
- 8:30 — Email, and the list. Accounting is a profession of lists and the list is how the work gets done.
- 8:45 — Reconciliations. A bank balance that is out by $1,840.17, and the next forty minutes of your life belong to finding it.
- 9:30 — Found it. A duplicated entry from three weeks ago. Small, satisfying, invisible to everyone else.
- 10:00 — A manager asks why one cost line is up 30%. You go and find out, which means talking to the people who spent it, not only looking at the number.
- 11:00 — Month-end work: accruals, journals, the unglamorous machinery that makes the statements true.
- 12:30 — Lunch. Somebody mentions busy season and everybody makes the same face.
- 13:15 — Build the report a non-financial manager asked for. The hard part is deciding what to leave out.
- 14:30 — Explain it to them. Twenty minutes, no jargon, and you watch them actually change their mind about something.
- 15:30 — Audit queries, or tax work, or a cash-flow forecast depending on the week and whether you are in practice or in industry.
- 17:00 — Done, except in busy season, when this is the middle of the day.
Honestly
Who loves this, and who should not do it
The second list is the useful one. Nearly every careers page leaves it out, which is why nearly every careers page reads like an advert.
- A number that does not reconcile nags at you until you find it.
- You like being the person who is trusted. Accountants get told things, early, because they have to be.
- You can explain something complicated to somebody who does not want to hear it.
- You want a qualification that travels — into any industry, any size of business, and into running one.
- You are fine with deadlines that genuinely cannot move, in exchange for a career that is stable and in demand.
- Detail work bores you. Being approximately right is not available in this job.
- You want to be making the thing rather than measuring it.
- You cannot stand sustained desk work — this is screens and spreadsheets for most of the day.
- You want to avoid a long qualification. The CPA route takes years alongside full-time work and it is demanding.
- You dislike being the one who says no. Part of the role is telling people, with evidence, that they cannot do what they want to do.
The route in
How you actually get there in Ontario
A degree, in anything, with the right courses
Entry to the CPA Professional Education Program needs a 120 credit-hour degree plus specific prerequisite subject coverage. The degree does not have to be in accounting — but if it is not, you will take the prerequisite courses separately, which adds time.CPA PEP
A graduate-level programme of six modules, usually done part-time over one to two years while you work. This is the stage where most candidates are simultaneously holding down a full-time job, and it is the reason the route takes as long as it does.The Common Final Examination
A three-day examination, offered twice a year, assessing competence across the whole profession rather than module by module. It is the gate everybody in the profession remembers.30 months of practical experience
Supervised, mentored by a CPA, and it can overlap with the prerequisite learning, PEP and the exam — which is why people are working throughout rather than studying and then starting.Or stop short, deliberately
Plenty of good careers in finance do not require the CPA at all: bookkeeping, payroll, accounts work, financial analysis in industry. A college accounting diploma gets you working years earlier, and some people later do the CPA from inside a job that is paying for it.
Where this comes from: CPA Ontario — The Guide to Becoming a CPA for Students · Job Bank — Financial auditors and accountants (NOC 11100) · ontariocolleges.ca — program search
The money
What it pays in Ontario
Job Bank's own figures, quoted rather than summarised, with the period they describe — so you can tell how old they are and go and check them.
- $24.73
- Low (hourly)
- $40.87
- Median (hourly)
- $72.12
- High (hourly)
Ontario, NOC 11100. Reference period 2023-2024, last updated by Job Bank on 19 November 2025. Wages vary a lot by region inside Ontario and by how long you have been doing it — the low figure is roughly where you start, not what the job is worth.
Before you leave school
Things you can do now
- Take Grade 11 and 12 accounting if your school offers it — BAF3M and BAT4M. It is the cheapest possible test of whether you like this, and it transfers directly.
- Keep a Grade 12 maths. University business and accounting programmes expect it.
- Do the books for something real: a team's fundraising, a club's float, a family business's receipts for one month. Doing it for real for one month beats a semester of exercises.
- Offer to help a small local business tidy one month of records. People say yes to this far more often than teenagers expect.
Test it
Do this before you decide anything
Reading about a job tells you almost nothing. This is designed to be done alone, this week, for free.
Reconcile something and see how it feels
About 60 minutes- Take one month of a real account — your own, or a club's, or a parent's business with permission. Every transaction.
- Categorise all of it by hand into no more than eight categories you invent yourself. Inventing the categories is the actual skill.
- Make the totals agree with the closing balance. Something will be out. Find it.
- Then write three sentences a non-financial person could act on: where the money went, what surprised you, what you would change next month.
What it tells you. The hour has two halves and they test different things. If finding the discrepancy was satisfying, you have the temperament for the technical work. If writing the three sentences was the best part, look at finance and analysis roles too — that is the half of this profession that pays for judgement rather than accuracy.
Better than any article
Questions for somebody who does this job
Most people say yes to a teenager who asks good questions. These are the ones that get real answers rather than encouragement.
- “What does busy season actually do to your life?”
- “How much of your week is accuracy work versus explaining things to people?”
- “Practice or industry — which did you pick and would you pick it again?”
- “Was the CPA worth it, and what did it cost you to get?”
- “What does software do now that you used to do by hand?”
- “What makes a junior stand out in their first year?”
- “What should a 17-year-old take in Grade 12 if they are considering this?”
Could you own one of these?
The part other career sites never mention
Very much so — accounting practices, bookkeeping businesses and CFO-for-hire work are all common, and an accountant who understands small business is one of the most useful people a founder can know. It is also the single most useful qualification to have if you intend to own some other kind of business.
Not sure this is the right list to be reading
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Wages and training requirements change. Every figure on this page is linked to the body that publishes it, and the review date above says when we last checked. If you find something out of date, tell us and we will fix it.