Typical Day
Depends. There are oh-so-many ways to skin the accountant cat. The typical day is a totally different drab beast for a retail CPA who works for H&R Block than it is for a corporate drone than it is for a senior partner at a big fat accounting firm like Big Fat Accountants Are We (or BFAAW, as they're known in the industry). Consider a day in each:
Retail Accountant
Murray Shlabovitz gets up and pours his high-bran Crispix, kisses his sleeping wife on the forehead below the netting, and walks out the door. He spends about a half-hour answering emails before his first client appointment. It's the early stages of tax season, so it's going to be a busy day. He pries into the world's personal finances, so he knows a lot more about his 'hood than almost anyone else in town. One guy wants to know if he can deduct his new Lexus as a business expense since he once drove from his office to Staples on an errand to buy a couple reams of colored cardstock.
Another gal wonders if she should list her Siamese cat Pearl as a dependent. His day is full of nutjobs, but bless it—he loves doing this sort of thing. He gets a few clients some nice refunds and saves the others a bit of green as well, all while not having to do anything sleazy or under-handed. His clients are just normal everyday people—a hair salon owner, a factory worker, a real estate agent. Simple returns for a simple man. Murray works hard to make a hundred grand a year (source). It's not crazy money, but it pays the bills; and, other than in March and the first half of April, he's home every night by 5:00PM. No fuss. No muss.
Corporate Drone
You really don't want to be this guy. Or gal. You work for IBM. Or Hewlett-Packard. Or Merck. Or another company with a crazy amount of lawyers and accountants. Being surrounded by peers is nice...until the company decides to downsize, looks at how many lawyers and accountants they have, and thinks, "Hmm, we don't need all these people." Your job is a kind of permanent internal audit…counting pencils, desks, heads, and widget units you sold last month. Was there fraud from vendor A? Is vendor B giving us the best deal? It's endless checking of numbers with no material value add or reward.
You don't really have a ton of power other than to raise your hand and tell on someone. But you get paid. Maybe a hundred and fifty grand a year (source). But the minute there's downsizing, your head is easily on the chopping block...and there's always some guy from Silicon Valley showing the CEO how they could fire all of you bean-counters and replace you with barcode. Read Man In The Gray Flannel Suit—great book—for a rough idea of the world you'd be living in.
Big Accounting Firm Partner
Now this gig is nice. It's nice, that is, if you bring in big fat clients who spend big fat fees for your big fat accounting services. And you woo them with a big fat expense account. Steak dinners. Golf at Pebble. Shwag. Let's say you're a hitter at the firm—that is, you have twenty good-sized clients who collectively pay a billion dollars in taxes each year. It's likely that you can bill $20 million in accounting services—maybe more—for audit and other "tax optimization strategies" (fancy term for avoiding paying taxes in creative ways). If you can bill $20 million, it's likely that half or more of that money is gross profit (i.e. profit after you have paid underlings to do the actual work). So you've made $10 million in gross profits for your firm—do you think it's fair that you should keep...a third? Half? Somewhere in there is probably fair (source).
It's bank. It's a few million bucks a year—as long as you keep those big, fat twenty clients happy and they keep needing your services (i.e. their own businesses continue to thrive). And what if you're The Big Cheese at the firm—the senior partner? You might have three hundred junior partners and thousands of other underlings, all billing something like $150 an hour when they cost you less than $70 an hour. Lots of bodies. Lots of unit profits. Lots of bucks for the owner. Nice gig if you can get it.
It's a step up from the garage.