Accounting career opportunities exist almost everywhere and accountants are in high demand as new businesses, small business, home-based businesses, corporations, and government expand or decline. Whether a business is growing or folding, there is an accountant needed to handle the transactions that will be prepared and submitted to the government, insolvency agency, or clients/shareholders. Accountants work with all types of individuals from every lifestyle; therefore, they need to be excellent at customer relations.

An accounting career begins by obtaining a diploma or degree from a vocational school, college, accounting institution, or university on a full-time, part-time, evening, distant learning, or online over the internet. Most of these accredited educational facilities have funding available to student using student aid, loans, grants, or scholarship programs, but students can also earn their diploma and degrees through night school program or apprenticeships by completing a specified number of courses. The student generally pays of the night school program out pocket, although those who are on apprenticeships usually have their courses paid by the employer.

Accountants usually work in office settings from nine to five each day from Monday to Friday, although during busy seasons like tax season, month end, or year end, some accountants work many overtime hours in the evenings, and on weekends and holidays. Accountants need to be extremely good with mathematics, percentages, and formulas, need to have great communications skills, need to be accurate, need to have attention for details, need to understand finances, need to be computer literate, need to enjoy working with people, and need to find numbers really interesting.

Most accountants once graduated go to work in public accounting firms, corporations and industries, for non-profit organizations, in government departments or agencies, for Chartered Public Accountants, as Auditors, and in Accounting Education as teachers. No matter which field of accounting you enter into you will be compiling and inputting sales, expenses, and other numerical data into double entry accounting software on a computer, so working with computers is an essential part of being an accountant. Data that is entering into the computers is then used to prepare month end and year-end statements for taxation offices, audits, and shareholders. This is a viable measure of how well any business is doing.