Work From Home

It’s OK to admit it–you want to work from home. But if your boss forbids it or limits your remote work time, what’s an accountant to do?

If you’re lucky, you work for an employer that embraces remote work and flexible work-from-home policies. If you’re tragically unlucky, your company is resisting the remote trend and forbidding work outside the office completely.

But more than likely, your firm is somewhere in the middle. There are some full-time remote employees at your company, but most accountants are largely stuck in the office during work hours. Work-from-home policies exist, but they’re restrictive.

And worse, those accountants at your firm who often work from home are privately viewed as lazy by coworkers and management, which can cost them promotions or, in extreme cases, their jobs.

Google it all you want, but as far as we can tell, you won’t find a solid statistic on how many accountants currently work from home–part-time or full-time. So if you’re looking to shove a “60% of accountants work remotely”-type figure into your boss’s face, you’re out of luck–for now, at least.

You can try this, an article from a Business Review that claims remote employees are more engaged than their in-office counterparts, but be prepared for your boss to point out that it does not apply to you and it's light on proven facts.

To build the most effective work-from-home case, your best bet is probably to resort to some good old-fashioned anecdotal evidence. Find some remote accountants in the industry performing similar duties to your own. Ask them how they stay on task, what types of communication and productivity apps they use, and try to get some proof they they’re doing their jobs well.

Look for examples within your firm, as well. Are other employees working from home or remotely? Are they finishing projects on time and providing quality work?

You’ll want to be careful when presenting your boss with the present status of remote work at your firm. The last thing you want to do is sound like a jealous younger sibling begging for the cushy work-from-home hours big brother gets.

But if you can put together some statistics on how much remote work is currently done at your firm and frame it in a way that doesn’t sound whiny, you should have a better chance of convincing your boss to give you more hours outside the office–or at least as much as the average worker is getting.