"Fiscal years" are stupid

[Great Rumbler]

Just get a computer to do the work then. Is a networked computer system that simply does calculations on the fly that hard to implement? Explain why in 30 seconds.

Because not every business activity is done on a computer? Because not every company USES computers for most of their activities? Because everything has to come out exactly right?

With end-of-year accouting you need everything to be virtually perfect. And if you're working at a big company and some numbers don't come out right, you're going to have to go through thousands and thousands of activities, transactions, and documents until you find that one number that was entered wrong or accidentally put in the wrong column or any number of other things. Computers help, of course, but you're still going to be doing a lot of it yourself.

You're right DJ, fuck accountants.

As someone who actually has some knowledge of what it is that accountants actually DO, if you're running anything bigger than a mom-and-pop operation you're going to be up a creek without a paddle if you don't have somebody to help you out.

And good luck getting a computer to decide if that machine you've got in the back can be propely designated as being held for sale or not. Or which method of depreciation is best for your company truck. Or telling you how you're supposed to account for the fact that you traded a machine plus $1000 to someone for another machine, only the machine that you got is a different kind of machine. Or which method of inventory valuation you should use or whether you should use the perpetual inventory system or the periodic system. Or how you should apply the cost of overhead to the products your company produces [do you apply based on machine hours, labor hours, amount of factory space used, or utilities used?]. Or how to deal with internally created good will. Or how to calculate the good will present in that chain of stores you just bought. Or how to evaluate the impairments on your newly gotten goodwill and when your supposed to evaluate it for impairment and when you can recover impairments. Or how you're supposed to distribute the costs associated with running a mining operation where you can reasonably estimate the yield of the mine and its residual value. Or any number of other things that a computer simply can't do for you.