Top 50 Accounting Blogs

When I first read the Top 50 Accounting Blogs, I was surprised and delighted that there are enough accounting blogs to merit a top 50 list. To be included in the list was an honour. My thanks to MBA Explorer for taking the time to do the research. MBA Explorer is a web site devoted to helping people choose the best American MBA program for them.

Should accountants be blogging? My answer is an emphatic YES!, but you should also approach the subject cautiously.

In my early years in accounting, our firm produced newsletters. The tax one sticks in my mind, not just because one of the students’ jobs was to run them over to client offices personally with each major tax change, but also because it was written by someone whose humour and point of view came across clearly. He injected his personality and experience into his writing. The result was that you felt like you knew the writer and would be comfortable talking to him about tax issues.

That would be my advice to a firm that wanted to start blogging: find someone on staff who is writing already (i.e. they have experience with and even enjoy putting their thoughts down coherently as well as working to a deadline). One of the problems I face is consistently coming up with new material.

If they don’t have direct experience with blogging, then start by reading the Top 50! Make some comments on the posts. People do read the comments. Also, participating through other people’s blogs gives you an entrance into the community. All of the bloggers I have met online have been helpful with the technical points of blogging as well as blog promotion. I get lots of ideas from other blogs.

Before starting a corporate blog, start with a personal blog for a few months, so your writer can get some risk-free experience. I would stay away from an external consultant who offers to write your blog for you. You want the voices of the experts in your company to be heard. Engaging a professional to help you promote your blog or to fit it within the context of your other marketing initiatives is a great idea, however.

Finally, be prepared to start small. Even if all the blog does is initiate a conversation with your existing clients, that alone is worth the effort. If you are already on this path, please leave me a comment about your experiences. At the end of the day, your firm’s voice is the voices of its partners, consultants and staff. Blogging will help you get some of those voices heard.

10 Comments on “Top 50 Accounting Blogs

  1. Congrats on your inclusion in the list too. 🙂

    I’ve intermittently thought, gee, would I want to do this ‘officially’, or am I happy with my rabid independence of sorts?

    As you can imagine, I think I still heavily lean towards the latter.

    There’s this thought that the moment you make it an official job responsibility you suck some of the fun out of it.

    Still, it’s not a crazy idea to leverage the resources you have internally. 🙂

  2. Great blog…love it! Here’s another interesting blog by the Barefoot Accountant, in defense of accountants.

    Certified Public Accountants are often characterized as stiff, lifeless, mechanical, humorless, myopic, anal, compulsive, regimented, geeky, and boring; however, in spite of these relatively complimentary epithets, they have been much maligned as well, particularly by marketing individuals. Although all of these characterizations may indeed “hit the mark” on many CPAs, these stereotypical descriptions do not apply to all CPAs: perhaps 99.9% of them, but certainly not 100% of them. In an attempt to set the record straight, and under the penname of the “Barefoot Accountant”, William Brighenti began writing a blog not only to discuss accounting, taxes, QuickBooks, auditing, American politics and money, but to publicize the CPA’s human side, which was, in fact, uncovered quite by accident by Charles Darwin in the 1830s while he was on the Galapagos Islands looking for fossils, refuting the mistaken belief that CPAs had become an extinct species centuries ago.

    Hopefully, you may find some of the Barefoot Accountant’s blog postings not only informative but entertaining, since he invariably pokes fun at his colleagues, as well at himself, at every available opportunity. Such publicized irreverence of the accounting profession accounts for much of the disdain expressed towards the Barefoot Accountant throughout the entire Milky Way and beyond by virtually every Certified Public Accountant, who have been applying to the Vatican to reinstate the Spanish Inquisition in order to burn him at the stake. The Barefoot Accountant has appealed to the Pope for intervention, a plenary indulgence, and a charitable donation, made out to “cash”. While awaiting financial salvation from above, William Brighenti continues to grind out tax returns and financials, pursuing truth, justice, and the American way.

  3. This is a great list. It is always good to see what accountants have to say through their blogs. there is a lot of good insight here. I really enjoy ‘Where the Penny Matters’ and ‘Understand Accounting’ in the list.

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