[EvanAnderson]

I took the 101/201-level accounting classes at a local community college before my partners and I started our IT support contracting business in 2004. (For me, instructor led training is a preferable delivery vehicle, but the results might well be the same if I enjoyed self-education for this kind of thing.)

The dividends paid by having basic accounting knowledge were twofold.

It definitely helped me run the business better-- particularly when it came to working with the CPA who handles our taxes. It also helped me in communicating the operation of the business to the partners who have less of an accounting background. I've ended-up doing all the bookkeeping for the business and I think we've saved a ton of money versus hiring an accountant to do that basic work. (We still hire-out for tax-related work because I don't want to sink time into learning those intricacies.)

The other major benefit, and arguably a larger one than the first, is giving me credibility when I talk to Customers' finance and accounting people. Properly using the terminology they're comfortable with to describe their business problems feels like it has helped me land relationships and projects. Obviously, I can't spin-up a "scratch universe" to test that hypothesis, but I do know that I've seen tech-heavy and accounting-light presentations by other vendors go over very badly with some of the same people.

Finally, I'd argue bookkeeping and accounting is, arguably, the oldest "information technology" discipline in humanity. Much of IT springs from the history of bookkeeping becoming computerized ("automatic data processing"). I think knowing the history of IT, be from the dawn of computer science birthing from logic and mathematics, or the first practical applications of IT to human problems, is valuable to its practitioners.

[rrnn]

I come from a family of accountants. But when I first went to college I chose IT Management which included both IT and Accounting subjects. I've worked on the IT Side for about a decade.

> The other major benefit, and arguably a larger one than the first, is giving me credibility when I talk to Customers' finance and accounting people.

I also have benefited a lot from the accounting subjects I took in college have also been an advantage in my professional career as I can 'speak the language' of my workplace's financial department.

> Finally, I'd argue bookkeeping and accounting is, arguably, the oldest "information technology" discipline in humanity. So much of the discipline springs from the history of bookkeeping becoming computerized ("automatic data processing"). It's a good background to working in IT to know about where it came from.

- Definitely. The software used at my family's the accounting office was older than any other I had used. This year I helped them migrate from an MSDOS Fox Pro 2 application to a newer app.

The MS-DOS It worked well, it is even still supported by the developer (!), but the work around required to make everything work in a Win 10 environment was too much of a hassle.

It felt like doing digital archeology when opening files created between 1989 and 1994 to see how data was stored. Even this newer app still uses an older tech stack: Visual Fox Pro 9. Accounting software seems to run in an alternate timeline.