The WERKin' Mommas™️

Nikki: 00:01

Okay. So I gotta talk about something. I feel like I'm going live. You know how you get on social media and people go live on video? I feel like I'm going live on audio because I'm watching the game.

Nikki: 00:21

I just got home from a work trip. And well, let me just stay there for a second because I get home, and my kitchen is a hot mess. My family knows we can't go to bed with that kitchen dirty. I can't stand my kitchen being dirty and I come home and there's, first of all, pots just bare sitting on the counter and they know do not sit pots on the counter unless you have the I forget what the thing is called. Unless you have the protector underneath.

Nikki: 01:00

So I've got 10 different pot holders, protectors. I don't know why I can't think of the name of it. Now I gotta go look it up. So if you have never tuned into my podcast, first of all, welcome. I'm glad that you're here, but there's usually a tangent.

Nikki: 01:25

And this is going to be the a trivet. Yes. A trivet. A trivet. That's what it's called.

Nikki: 01:31

So they know not to sit pots on the counter without a trivet. And there was a time where my cast iron skillet was sitting on my freaking on my quartz countertops without a trivet, and I almost lost it. So not only are there pots sitting on my counters bare without a trivet, my good Viking pots are sitting with old food in them from yesterday. I I let the dog out. I missed him, and I gave him a hug.

Nikki: 02:08

But the rule in the house is if you take the dog out the crate, you gotta take him outside. So I took him outside, and my neighbor is over there with her with her German shepherd, and he's real sweet. So he is loose. And he comes to the backyard, and he sees my dog. And he didn't run up to him aggressively.

Nikki: 02:33

He actually seemed like he was being nice, but here comes my dog thinking he's a big dog jumping up on this German Shepherd, which is about 10 times his size. So it got to a point where the German shepherd was running away as if he was afraid and my dog was chasing him again, like he is the same size as this dog. My dog's name is Poet. He thinks he's a big dog and he is twelve pounds, not even soaking wet. So now I had to deal with that.

Nikki: 03:11

So now I'm talking to my neighbor. We're laughing about the whole thing, but, you know, my dog really thinks that he is a big dog and he is not. So I dealt with that. And then I come back in the house and I'm like, it's hot up in here. Like, what is going on?

Nikki: 03:29

I look at the thermostat. The thermostat says 79 degrees inside the house. Even with all the curtains closed, nobody opened, none of the curtains today. And they know when I get up in the morning, is the first thing that I do. So even with the house being in the shade, because there was no sun coming in, making the house hot, even with the curtains closed and no external heat coming in, It was 79 degrees in the house and nobody turned on the freaking AC.

Nikki: 04:05

So that was that. And I'm like, so then my son texted me because he needed something. He was supposed to do something at school today, but didn't tell us until the last minute. So he didn't get to do it. So now he has to go do it tomorrow, which means he has to miss a class.

Nikki: 04:22

And I'm just like, listen. All of this happened in a span of ten minutes of me finally getting home to my own bed from a work trip. Speaking of the bed, so before I left a couple of days ago, I changed my sheets every week, sometimes twice a week. I changed my sheets. I took them off the bed, sheets, all the pillowcases.

Nikki: 04:50

I got a bunch of pillows on my bed, took off all the pillowcases, all the sheets, the flat sheet, the fitted sheet, the quilt, the duvet, the everything. I took everything off, let the pillows air out. I put the linens in the corner because my thought was somebody who will remain nameless will see this pile of linens and throw them in the washer. So when I get back home, I have some fresh sheets. I love five star hotels.

Nikki: 05:20

I just don't like when it's time to go to bed because I wanna be in my own bed. But I come home and my bed is still sheetless. Again, this is all in the span of ten minutes of me coming home. So I said, you know what? I'm about to pour me a shot of Hennessy because this is too much.

Nikki: 05:41

And I'm about to sit down and watch the game. And I'm sitting down to watch the game and for some reason no, it wasn't for some reason. It was for a specific reason. So I've been getting signs from God that this CPA exam coaching thing is about to pop beyond my wildest dreams. A couple of invitations I've had to partner with different organizations to do CPA exam prep work.

Nikki: 06:25

Some firms have reached out and even some educators have reached out. And what made this pop into my mind is I got a message from an educator asking for my help with putting together a CPA exam review program for their school. And it blew my mind. And I'm sitting here like, if I did the in person so I've been doing my my in person CPA exam sessions and I try to tailor it to what the candidates need, but there was a part of me that was like, the candidates don't always know what they need. So how do I handle those situations where a candidate might have a question about a practice question they saw that didn't make sense.

Nikki: 07:36

The answer didn't make sense, but what happens? What else is there after we get through the practice questions? What other questions would they ask? And I said, they probably don't even know what they need to ask. They don't know what they don't know.

Nikki: 07:55

And I thought back to my experiences when I took in person review classes. And I said, what would I have done differently if I was the instructor versus the candidate? And one thing that I would have done that I've actually implemented in my live courses is talking to the students. And the one thing I say all the time is you got to get out that textbook. You got to get out the textbook trying to learn things by the book because in real life accounting is not always by the book.

Nikki: 08:39

You can have the example that I will talk about ad nauseam is you can have bank reconciliations that even if you learn from a textbook, from a CPA exam review book or a video, or you go through practice questions or simulations, you can learn how to reconcile the bank account that way. But there are times when you will go into a company as a staff accountant, as a senior, even as an accounting manager, hell, even as a controller or a director, you might have to reconcile the balance sheet. And I know it because I've had to do it. Big fancy titles don't mean anything inside of certain companies if the accounting department is not up to par. So I say all of that to say, you can go into a company where there's 10 different bank accounts and one is a ZBA, one is a payroll account, one is a tax account, one is a reserve account for something with restricted cash accounts, one is the operating account and, or one is the lockbox account.

Nikki: 10:03

So you got all these different accounts and you might've learned one way to reconcile accounts when you do it the textbook way, but then you get into these companies and you have to figure out, well, what's the difference between the operating account and the lockbox account? Or what am I supposed to do with this restricted cash rec? If it's restricted, it shouldn't change, but there's things that you need to know. Or you might say, looking at an operating account, what type of activity typically flows in and out of this account? How do I know that this activity doesn't belong in a different bank account?

Nikki: 10:46

Right? How do I know where the reconciling items are if I'm thinking that the wreck is right and I have, I've done it the right way, but I still got a $18,000 variance. Where do I go if I have a variance between my ledger and my bank statement? How do I even begin the first step in the research? Those are the things that I feel like are missing in some of the resources used to prepare for the CPA exam because, I mean, doesn't matter how well written the book is, how sexy the book is, how cute the cover is.

Nikki: 11:40

There are things in practice that you are going to see that you're not gonna know what to do with. And so that's okay. The important thing is knowing how to go do that research, knowing how to take the first step to figure out the answer to the problem. And I mean, when I started hosting the live sessions where I meet with the candidates in person, we talk about the content on each section. We go through the practice questions, some of the things I already talked about, talked about why the right answer is the right answer and why the other three answers are wrong.

Nikki: 12:30

And then we go over things in the text that they may not understand, a topic that they may get tripped up on that we need to go deeper into. But then I thought about myself when I was in those shoes of somebody who's studying for the CPA exam and you're wanting it so bad, but you realize that, I mean, I had to figure out how to study for this exam and I had to figure out how to integrate it into my daily life, which at that time, even still my daily life consisted of being a mama to two small kids, running an accounting department, running my house, having a husband, running the business that me and my husband started, which skyrocketed in a matter of days. And then trying to find time for myself somewhere in all of that, right? So a big difference between what I just said in terms of where I was at that time and how I operated versus the way I operate now is that finding time for myself, which was last on my list has become number one on the list. At the time, my kids were small, they were toddlers, they were six and three.

Nikki: 13:59

So they needed basically everything for me. And now that they're mostly independent to the point of asking for the keys to my car, I feel like I can celebrate the fact that I did what I needed to, I did what I needed to do for the betterment of my family. And I know that we're talking about the CPA exam. What does me raising my kids have to do with the CPA exam, especially when some candidates don't even have kids? I get it.

Nikki: 14:37

But the point is to some degree, everybody who was studying for the CPA exam and to get that license is doing so for the betterment of their family. So now I feel like I'm in the pulpit like Bishop Littman, because I'm actually going somewhere with what I'm saying. There was a time that I couldn't turn my back on my kids because they would get into something or I was trying to keep them out of something or they needed me to fix their food or give them a bath or lay down with them until they went to bed. There were nights when I curled up in the bed with my kids with my book. And I also had my phone because I would turn on the sleeping music for them, or they call it sleeping music.

Nikki: 15:28

It was classical music or ocean waves. And I would turn those on for them so they could fall asleep. And while they were falling asleep, I had the dim light on my phone so I could see the text in the book and read over the things that I had highlighted in my books earlier that day. And when you, it's like my uncle, pastor Mitch said, when you have a desire, you have to have the desire. I was at a point where I was going to get my CPA license and I didn't care what it took.

Nikki: 16:09

I didn't know the exact day. And I'm sitting here getting emotional about this. When I think about the mindset that I was in of like, this is no matter what, there is no plan B, plan C, getting my license is plan A and I'm not creating no backup plan because this is going to happen. And when I think about how adamant I was, how assertive I was, how focused I was, I didn't know what day it was gonna happen, but I knew that it was going to happen. I knew that I was gonna pass the CPA exam.

Nikki: 16:52

And I didn't care how many times I had to take it. I didn't care how much money I had to pay. And when you want something bad enough, you are willing to do whatever it takes. And I wanted my CPA license bad enough, number one. Number two, I said, this exam is not going to defeat me because there's so many other licensed CPAs.

Nikki: 17:24

So it's doable. Even if we were talking about going to the moon that only a handful of people have done, it's doable. And that's where my head was at. So that was a long tangent around me trying to say, I'm a firm believer that I passed far on the first track because I knew what I was doing in a practical sense. I had seen most of the FAR content for a good ten years before I started studying for the exam.

Nikki: 18:12

So when I get my review course and I schedule my exam, I got my MTS and I started looking at the blueprint. Well, I didn't look at the blueprint the first time. I looked at it, I take that back. I looked at it, I just, I didn't pay it much attention because I was using my CPA exam review course as the blueprint when that's not the case. So if you have a review course and you're basing your study plan on what's in the course, stop that now.

Nikki: 18:53

Go to the AICPA's website, download the latest version of the CPA Exam Blueprint, and go to the section for whichever section you're studying for, and spend some time getting familiar with the blueprint. This tells you what's gonna be tested, how it could possibly be tested, and what the objective of that testing is. And also how that particular topic is allocated across your exam. So for example, it might say for FAR that the balance sheet is 45% of the exam. That means basically every other question on the exam can be about the balance sheet.

Nikki: 19:42

But to say that the exam is about the balance sheet is so broad that you could be talking about journal entries, you could be talking about accounts, you can be talking about the basic accounting equation, you can be talking about year over year comparisons, you can be doing a narrative about not just the numbers in the balance sheet, but what does it mean when certain accounts go up and others go down? Or just taking a step back and glancing at the balance sheet, what can you say about this company in terms of their leverage, their profitability, their liquidity? So there's a story that can be told from looking at financial statements. And that is where the value of CPAs come in. I knew how to look at a balance sheet and how to figure all these things out.

Nikki: 20:46

So it's the practicality that's going to come into play when it comes to studying for this exam. So this was a quick little live audio I needed to do. I'll be back with some more conversations, but I wanna pause right there for a minute. For one to give y'all something to think about, but for two, because my baby just got home and I haven't seen him all day. So y'all be good.

Nikki: 21:13

You got questions or comments about this episode, shoot me a note, social media, send me an email or hit me up on LinkedIn. I will put all of the contact info in the notes and we will finish this conversation, but until then, y'all be good.