Has anyone worked for a partner who is/was a perfectionist and you were not? Did you try to make everything perfect to appease the partner or did you just let them bitch about how not precise everything was and moved on? Feel like partners being perfectionist is a recipe for disaster.

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I worked for a perfectionist when I first joined the National tax department of a B4 firm. For 6 years it was incredibly frustrating, but I did what I could and tried as hard as I could to meet his standards.

He retired and that experience paid dividends many times over. There is no chance I would have continued to progress and have some measure of success with my career without the passion for excellence and high quality that he instilled in me.

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Yes. But I’ve been working with them for over 8 years. They used to get really annoyed when I didn’t exactly match the same shade on certain cells or forgot a period at the end of a note. However they came to realize I was much more technical than them and so the underlying quality was better. So they can spend less time reviewing the underlying data and more time reviewing the deliverable look. It’s a symbiotic relationship now and works well for us.

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I know exactly what you are talking about. When I review something, and the workpaper isn’t perfect, but I’m able to get to the right answer, sometimes I don’t ask the staff to fix it in the interest of time and realization, and to avoid re-review. I don’t sweat the small stuff and it allows me more time to take a step back and look at it with a big picture view. The problem occurs when a Sr. Mgr is does more detailed of a review than necessary, skips their big picture review and we end up wasting even more people’s time making things look nice. Different people have different standards and preferences, and molding things or trying to guess how someone wants something presented wastes time. The workpaper either provides adequate support or it doesn’t. Everything else is unnecessary in my opinion if the return is accurate and supported.

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Are you in tax or audit? And what types of things are you talking about with regard to perfection? In some cases sloppiness can lead to material errors and costly mistakes (I’m in tax).

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Partners also don’t want sloppy work papers in case those work papers ever get subpoenaed! I worked for a partner years ago that had just been deposed and he definitely became a “perfectionist” after that

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It depends on what you mean by being a perfectionist. If it means all the numbers tick & tie - that is just doing quality work.

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Yes. In all cases, those partners are trying to make sure there’s quality work that either sells our next engagement or keeps us out of trouble.

I don’t “appease” them, I take the feedback, synthesize it into a list and use it as a quality review check. Where I have a team under me, they know to account for those items in their own work/review before it gets to me.

What is the disaster you foresee coming?

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Elaborate on perfectionist. Are you talking about the work itself or the look of the work, like font size, column width, etc?

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Do you mean the nature, timing, and especially the extent of procedures and documentation that is necessary to persuade them versus other partners is three standard deviations above the mean? Then yes… I fought back (logically) and would win a fair amount f the time but it became exhausting and one of the reasons I quit

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Why would you want to work for a partner that didn’t want your best work? It means your attention to detail and diligence on projects will make you stand out.

If mediocrity makes you happy, go for it.

Thought you were talking about my marriage for a sec….

Haha

I guess it depends on what you mean by perfectionist. I try not to have any spelling or grammar errors in anything that goes to the client because it reflects poorly on the firm and raises questions about what kind of errors there might be in the numbers. I leave a clear trail in my wps so that the reviewer doesn't have to re-do the work to confirm accuracy. I think a lot of new accountants think managers and partners are just being picky, but when you become a reviewer, you realize why accuracy and good wps are important. A preparer needs to spend enough time on the project so that the reviewer can speed through and not spend hours fixing it, re-doing it, or kicking it back to the preparer unnecessarily.

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