What skills matter most for new accountants beyond technical knowledge?

The professionals interviewed in this article all pointed to the same gap: judgment, communication, and investigative thinking. Technical accounting knowledge gets you in the door, but knowing how to ask the right questions, follow up with unresponsive stakeholders, and recognize when numbers tell an incomplete story is what separates entry-level accountants from those who move into advisory or leadership roles.

Why do balanced books not always mean accurate financial reporting?

A set of books can balance perfectly and still present an inaccurate picture of the business. This typically happens when transactions are recorded in the wrong period, categorized under incorrect accounts, or entered by teams that do not understand how their entries affect downstream financial statements. Debits equaling credits confirms the math, not the meaning.

What should someone expect when starting a career in accounting?

Expect the job to involve far more human interaction than the coursework suggests. Clients go unresponsive, discrepancies require investigation that goes well past the ledger, and non-accountants will need you to translate financial data into language they can act on. The technical skills are a baseline, not a differentiator.

Expert Roundup

3 Accountants on What Surprised Them Most About the Profession (Mar 2026)

A CPA, an IRS Revenue Officer, and a bookkeeping manager on the gap between what they expected and what the job actually demanded.

Published March 18, 20263 min read3 experts featured

Featured Experts

Trumaine Easy

CPA & Owner, True Accounting & Finance Experts

Joshua Wahls

Founder, Insurance By Heroes

Akash Dey

Bookkeeping Support Manager, Book Tech

Nobody warns you that the hardest part of accounting has almost nothing to do with numbers. Ask three professionals what surprised them most about the work and none of them mention debits, credits, or spreadsheets. They talk about people. Unresponsive clients, hidden assets, and teams that record entries without understanding what those entries actually mean downstream.

Trumaine Easy is a CPA and the owner of True Accounting & Finance Experts. Early in his career, he was reviewing financial activity for a large organization and came across an account balance that technically tied out. Everything reconciled on paper. The problem only surfaced when he started comparing the books to what was actually happening on the operational side.

“That experience stuck with me. It was the clearest reminder that balanced numbers do not always mean accurate information. You can have debits equal credits and still be telling the wrong financial story.”
Trumaine Easy, CPA & Owner at True Accounting & Finance Experts

The entries were being recorded in the wrong period, consistently, because the team handling them did not understand how their work affected downstream reporting. Easy says the technical side matters, but it is only part of the picture. His advice for anyone starting out is to focus on observing patterns and learning the business behind every entry. "The people who advance fastest are rarely the ones with the quickest calculations," he says. "They are the ones who develop judgment early."

I think most people picture accounting and tax work as a desk job. For Joshua Wahls, the reality looked nothing like that. As an IRS Revenue Officer in the Mid-Atlantic region, he spent his days visiting businesses and homes to collect missing returns and unpaid taxes.

“I remember one specific case where a business owner had millions in unpaid payroll taxes but claimed he had no assets. By digging into his bank records and physical assets, I found he was funneling money into cryptocurrency to hide it.”
Joshua Wahls, Founder at Insurance By Heroes

Wahls, who went on to found Insurance By Heroes, says the numbers on the page are only half the story. His advice is to get out from behind the screen. Go see the operations and talk to the people running the business. "Real world accounting happens on the warehouse floor as much as it happens in Excel," he says.

Akash Dey, a Bookkeeping Support Manager at Book Tech, learned a version of the same lesson from the opposite direction. His team took on a retail client who had fallen months behind on bookkeeping, with a large volume of transactions and documents that were not sorted or organized. The client stopped responding to emails and calls for weeks at a time. Dey spent that period hunting down receipts and invoices, trying to sync them with entries that had gone stale. The books were technically fixable, but no one on the client side was available to answer the questions that would have cut the timeline in half. "Communication is highly important to make the task smooth," Dey says. "You can have the books, invoices, and receipts, and it would still be difficult to pull off without it."

Three different roles, three different settings, and the same conclusion. The numbers are the starting point. The actual work starts when you look up from the ledger and figure out what is going on behind them.

Sources

1.Featured.com Expert Roundup(accessed Mar 18, 2026)

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Brennan Kolar

Founder, Atlas CPA Index

Brennan Kolar is the founder of Atlas CPA Index, an independent CPA review comparison platform covering all 55 U.S. jurisdictions. With over 10 years of experience in the CPA industry, he built Atlas to help candidates find the right review course based on how they actually learn, not which provider has the biggest ad budget.

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Expert Roundup

3 Accountants on What Surprised Them Most About the Profession (Mar 2026)

A CPA, an IRS Revenue Officer, and a bookkeeping manager on the gap between what they expected and what the job actually demanded.

Published March 18, 20263 min read3 experts featured

Featured Experts

Trumaine Easy

CPA & Owner, True Accounting & Finance Experts

Joshua Wahls

Founder, Insurance By Heroes

Akash Dey

Bookkeeping Support Manager, Book Tech

“That experience stuck with me. It was the clearest reminder that balanced numbers do not always mean accurate information. You can have debits equal credits and still be telling the wrong financial story.”
Trumaine Easy, CPA & Owner at True Accounting & Finance Experts

“I remember one specific case where a business owner had millions in unpaid payroll taxes but claimed he had no assets. By digging into his bank records and physical assets, I found he was funneling money into cryptocurrency to hide it.”
Joshua Wahls, Founder at Insurance By Heroes