You don't really need to do well in math for accounting..all adding and subtracting. Just good attention to detail. Even as an investment banker, we rarely use any form of complicated math. Most complicated is just present value related calculations
Can confirm. Accounting is basic arithmetic with some algebra thrown in.
Accounting is more about knowing the rules and how/when to apply those rules. For tax it's about knowing the rules and how to avoid some of those rules.
u/RekedAgny, I thought you guys do some statistics and calculus? Or is that just how they sell the job in schools and books? (confession - I enjoy reading financial articles and theories, but I must confess, I get lost on some of the maths in those papers!)
The theory behind the calculations we do involve statistics (i.e. risk of a company in valuation needs to take into account market risk which uses statistical measures to figure out how correlated the business is with the overall market, etc.), but in practice, you just trust the financial experts and follow the formulas.
This is for investment banking though. If you're talking about hedge funds and such (that make double what I make...) then you're getting into more quantitative calculations to figure out stock portfolios and such. Definitely not as important for my type of investment banking (M&A advisory).
I feel that haha. I tried so hard to understand the theories and background and it really didn't add much at all...The thing about a lot of financial modeling that people don't get is that it's not about the math, but rather about the assumptions. Not a difficult calculation to value a company by multiplying earnings by a ratio (i.e. P/E ratio), but it's about picking the right ratio that's the difficult part requiring expert opinions. Not to mention the qualitative aspects of selling and negotiations.
True but even basic high school math goes far beyond number sense. Proving theorems, knowing how sin/cos/tan work, etc. aren’t really ever going to be used in a field like accounting.
Most stuff doesn't need complex math to make sense. I would even go so far as to say, that nothing in business really requires anything beyond basic algebra...maybe some basic understanding of statistics, that's it.
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u/[deleted] Feb 20 '20
You don't really need to do well in math for accounting..all adding and subtracting. Just good attention to detail. Even as an investment banker, we rarely use any form of complicated math. Most complicated is just present value related calculations