Question for the olds: What was busy season like back in the day? Like before Microsoft office, mainstream email (or internet for that matter), etc? Better or worse?

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And the "portable computer" weighed 50lbs, and had a five inch amber monitor. But we could play Larry the Lounge Lizard on it when we had nothing going on

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I can't even imagine attempting to do this job without technology

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No email meant you actually had to converse with your coworkers on issues. We didn't have Lotus or Excel to do our math for us - that's what ledger paper, calculator tape and pencils were for. When I started, I had just missed the time where you filled in tax interview forma@by hand and delivered them to FastTax for them to enter on the return and send back to you for review - I was lucky to have a chance be that sat by the server and after I entered info in the return, would save and send it to calc- and I could watch the server screen to see when it was done and pull it back down. But that also meant I got calls from other staff to ask if the return they'd sent was still calculating. We had projection and trial balance software and some others, but we wrote our own batch codes in Dos 6.1 for our menu to access them. All files generated in the trial balance were saved on floppy disks (first the large ones that were easily damaged and then the smaller ones) and taped to the inside of the tax folder. The most fun was picking out the colors for the file folders each year - at a glance, you knew to grab the yellow, pink and blue ones for 1992, 1993, and 1994 files. And time sheets by hand were lovely. 😂😂😂

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Was probably awful. No =SUM formula? Using a calculator to reconcile long ass TB's!? 💀💀

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I heard from old school partners the audit was cake. The work might've sucked, but you only audited the balance sheet. Audits were a million times less regulatory intensive. Partners had huge corner offices with views, art and furniture.

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Where you actually used more of your own brain to figure things out instead of clicking a button or icon...

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Trunks full of workpapers...literally tons of working to move back to the office when an audit was done. Handwritten memos with holes in it where dates had been erased and re-entered. Yes, we only hit the balance sheet back in the day.

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I remember using column paper to do sums at Deloitte, Touche Ross as they were called. Hated paper time sheets. Email had just come in so we'd spend a lot of time emailing each other for non business chats e.g arranging drinks @ the pub. Good times.

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And before the pcaob...

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^audit bags and luggage carts just to take stuff two or three returns home to work on. Remember the "paper assholes" - round reinforcements to put over all hole punches in the paper so they didn't rip as you flipped thru them in the folder.

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I worked with an audit partner who told me about the first company she worked for - they were encouraged to use the backside of the calculator tape rather than throw it away to save money - so unless you were putting in a work paper, you weren't supposed to tear it off so that you could re-roll it. She decided there was a going concern question and found another company. 😂😂

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But paper time sheets were "ok" - not as many damn codes to worry about!

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