Official start of the busy season

I went to college knowing I wanted to be an accountant. In doing so, I knew that meant I was in for some long hours every spring as long as I wanted to be in public accounting. Whether I was a tax accountant or an auditor, the spring is our busiest time of year. As an auditor, we deal with auditing year-end financial statements and the majority of businesses work on a calender year end. I have a few clients that have their fiscal year end on September 30, but those are few and far between. That means, from about the middle of January until the end of March or early April, I'm stuck being busier than you can imagine. The firm says we have to work a mandatory 55 hour week. This usually works out to about 50 hours Monday-Friday and 5 hours on Saturday. Sometimes it's more during the week and then we have the whole weekend off (which is preferred in my mind), but most of the managers I work with prefer to work shorter week day hours and come in on Saturday. When I'm the manager, it'll be different (whether the people below me like it or not).

For some reason, this season seems to be starting slower than normal. It's January 20th and I'm only at my first client of the year. On top of that, we're off to a slow start as this client really isn't ready for us to be here. They're trying to work with us as much as possible, but they've had some turnover in their accounting department and the new employees just aren't very experienced in their jobs. Part of it is their working with for a new employer, and part of it is that they didn't do a very good job in the hiring process. The CFO understands this, but is trying to get through the spring without having to replace them. Unfortunately, this is making my job more difficult as I feel like I know more about their business than they do. Unfortunately, that makes my job extremely difficult as they are not able to answer any of the questions I have and I have to discuss everything with the CFO. His time is very valuable and it's hard to sit down and talk to him for more than 20 minutes at a time. I'm having lunch with him today, so hopefully that will help open up some communication as it's much easier to discuss his employees with him when we're outside of the office.

So, that being said, I'm pretty frustrated with the busy season already. Usually it takes me until the end of February or early March before I'm entirely put off by it and ready to quit my job. Luckily, this is a small-ish client and I should be done with it by the first week of February. Maybe the next client will be better.