What the work actually is

You build the artifacts a competent senior or manager would produce in a real close or audit, except the deliverable is a self-contained, checkable file rather than something filed with the SEC. A typical task might be: construct an ASC 842 lease schedule from a fact pattern, roll it forward through a modification, show the journal entries, and write the PowerPoint slide explaining the P&L and balance sheet impact. Others look like a deferred tax rollforward with a valuation allowance judgment, consolidation eliminations with intercompany profit in inventory, an ASC 718 expense schedule with graded vesting and forfeiture true-ups, or a quarterly flux analysis with tie-outs back to the trial balance. The chain from subledger to journal to trial balance to financial statement has to hold, and the numbers have to foot both across and down.

What the platform screens for

AfterQuery's screen is looking for whether you can produce work that survives review by another CPA. Expect probes into specific codification sections rather than general familiarity — what changes in the measurement when a lease is remeasured versus modified, how an ASC 606 variable consideration constraint is documented, why a particular elimination hits NCI. Expect Excel questions about mechanics rather than about formulas in the abstract: how you structure a rollforward so a reviewer can trace any number to its source, how you handle circularity, how you build in check totals. There is also a judgment layer — much of the value here is spotting where a model's accounting answer is subtly wrong, so screeners often present a flawed schedule and ask what's off. QuickBooks experience is stated as required and is likely probed at the level of chart-of-accounts structure and how transactions post, not certification.

Logistics and pay

  • Fully remote and asynchronous; no standing meetings, no fixed hours
  • Roughly 10 hours per week when you have an active project, with gaps between projects
  • Contract, project-based; deliverables are Excel and PowerPoint files
  • Observed pay for this listing is $80–150/hr, typically scaled to task complexity and your review history — not guaranteed, and rates on data-generation platforms move

The workload pattern matters: this suits someone with a day job or a practice who can absorb a defined task block, not someone needing steady weekly volume. An active CPA license in any U.S. state is a hard gate.