When are accountants working?

When are accountants working?  

Wrapping up the monthly close in time, scrambling to identify what’s changed since an account was last reconciled, or coordinating with departments to get the right data in time — it’s easy for accounting work to spill over into late nights or the weekend.

Accountants often talk about late hours and struggling to fit in the volume of tasks in a finite number of hours. So naturally, our team was curious, when are accountants working? 

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Our data & methods 

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Accounting teams use our product to manage their monthly, quarterly, and year-end closes, tracking every task and review as they make their way through the exhaustive list of steps involved in closing the books. 

We pulled anonymized data on when tasks were marked as completed across the entirety of 2023 from a random sample of 1000 accountants leveraging our product across various company sizes, titles, and industries, adjusting for time zones. 

We’ll admit outright — we realize that not every accounting task is encompassed in the monthly close, but observing when accountants are officially marking monthly close tasks as complete does give us a window into productivity. 

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When accountants work

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From our sample, we discovered—

Accountants are completing more tasks on Tuesdays than any other day. 

Unsurprisingly perhaps, Fridays lagged behind as the day accountants submitted the least amount of tasks. 

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And the rumors about weekend work? Certainly true for some accountants who submitted hundreds of tasks on Saturdays and Sundays. Overall, however, we found that approximately 3% of all tasks were completed on weekends. 

Completely possible that in part some of the reduced weekend work was due to mapping out clearly the monthly-close process, dependencies, and keeping monthly-close project management on track, all practices customers use Numeric to implement.

What about late nights? Over 34% of tasks were submitted past 7 p.m., certainly substantiating the fact that accountants are often working late hours. 

And we found that a smaller share of accountants are crossing items off their to-do lists first thing in the morning as well, with roughly 18% of tasks submitted by 10 a.m. 

From our data, it appears that accountants are typically night owls and not morning larks. 

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In summary – it appears accountants are completing the highest volume of tasks on Tuesdays with a fair share of tasks completed after 7:00 p.m. 

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For all accountants reading, how does this compare to your teams’ working habits?

And for those in the late night or weekend work camp — our team is wishing you a 2024 full of work / life balance.