Hello world!

Hi there! I'm Daniel. I'm a CPA, and I love playing music, running, rockclimbing, and most recently I have an obsession with Python. So much so that I decided to start a fun little blog to document my adventures with exploring its usefulness in the accounting world.

If you're an accountant who has never heard of Python or have heard of it but not really used it much, this is the blog for you. And I encourage feedback and suggestions on future topics so we can explore Python together. Send me any ideas you have to python4cpas@gmail.com.

I anticipate getting down and dirty in the code shortly, but I will have to decide what topics to get into first, and how to do it.

For now, I'd recommend checking out some of the great free resources online, such as my favorite, Rice University's courses on Coursera or another good one is Univ of Michigan's course also on Coursera.

My Python use is very heavily data driven, more on numbers than words, and often involve data pulled from PDF files. I plan to cover some generally useful topics (like how to foot a 600 page PDF file in a matter of minutes, or how to take a general ledger in CSV format and import it into Python, summarize on certain data elements, and export the summarized data into an excel file), and some very specific topics (like how to grab the stock sale transactions from a Wells Fargo 1099, turn it into a table format, and export it into excel, or how to grab stock prices for certain stock tickers on a specific date).

The posts will likely be in one of the following categories:

Tax stuff
Audit/financial statement stuff
Other generally useful stuff

Looking forward to some fun Python exploring!

Cheers,
-Daniel