I am writing this to cleanse my soul, for I weep for the art of bookkeeping and accounting. I did my apprenticeship: years in general accounting practice. I did the VAT returns for pubs, where the owner had kept his receipts in a box under the drip trays; for plasterers and sub-contractors to whom substantiated expenses were for the likes of ICI.

Then I saw the emergence of the Mercedes-driving salesman of the accounting software vendors. In the practice at which I worked, a siren would be sounded every time we heard the words, "I bought a computer system and the guy said it would pay for itself in reduced audit fees." One client bought a system, had the training and signed up for the expensive support. Then they decided it would be better if they did not bother to run the year-end procedure! Three months later, when we were given the accounts and trial balance, it was meaningless.

However, we were the villains of the piece: they had done everything those who had sold them the package had told them to do. It was we, the auditors, who were "just trying to increase our fees". I thought I'd seen it all at that point.

It was time to move on. I left to work in business. First up, a company in the retail sector. It was very highly geared and, looking through the purchase ledger, I found some credit balances. "What are these?" I asked. "I don't know," said the incumbent FD. Three phone calls later and cheques for £20,000 were heading for our office. I asked each of the suppliers why they hadn't been returned before. "You never asked before," was the reply. The refund was equal to my annual salary.

I left retail and moved to manufacturing. But the actual making things part was being moved to a place where the daily wages were less than a pair of safety boots.

So, I decided to go contracting. My first posting was again in manufacturing. I joined just after the end of their financial year. I had to put an audit file together. No problem, it was indexed with supporting schedules and copies of invoices – everything. The auditors arrived – it was my first experience of the Big Four. What a let-down! Two juniors for two weeks asking the same questions they'd asked the day before. "Have you looked in the file?" I would ask.

The partner then arrived. "We have just a few questions to ask and then we are done," he said. It was decided after an hour that the few questions would be better done in writing, and a week later we had a three-page document: "Can you detail all items on the profit and loss account and justify them?" Needless to say, they were referred to the file that they had already been given. No further questions were asked.

I left there to go to a finance role in the auto trade. It lasted ten hours. The young lady who was doing the hand-over spent the entire time in tears. She said, "I don't know why the FC has asked me to show you how to this because I don't understand it."

But the clincher was that a cheque for £400,000 had been posted to the wrong purchase ledger account. The lady who found it asked the FC if she could post a dummy credit and dummy invoice to move the money to the right account. She was told in no uncertain terms that this would mess up the system – how he managed to keep from laughing I do not know.

I arrived at my next assignment to be given a one page P&L by the group controller. Several figures had been circled in red pen with the words, "do not believe". I asked the accountant who had produced the figures for the balance sheet that accompanied the P&L. "I don't do one," he said. "Well let's see the reconciliations." "I don't do any," he said. The young man was one exam off being qualified. He was asked to leave.

I left there to take up a role at a company that had installed SAP. But it hadn't been configured properly. We decided to go back a year and reprocess all the items in a new system. The process took two months and was a "success". I was asked to stay on to do the first few months’ management accounts.

On the tenth of the month, the FD would ask for just the overhead report from SAP and then disappear into his office. Next morning it was like the fairies had been in: there, on page one of a 16-column analysis pad, would be the reported P&L. Journals would be posted to the system to make SAP look the same as the paper and that was month end. Oh, except that the holding company would want the results in a grindingly slow, purpose-built, internet-based database package. Why the tenth of the month? So that we had seven days in which to enter them onto the database. Had we posted the analysis pad to head office, I'm sure the Royal Mail would probably have got it there quicker.

What tipped me over the edge, the reason I'm writing this, is that on my latest assignment I have been looking at the fixed asset schedule. It's nicely done in Excel and it throws the depreciation figure for the month to you as a reward for completing the additions. Brilliant. But I've just noticed that it's also continuing to depreciate assets that have already been fully written off...

Have I just been unlucky? Or is it time I gave up on accounting?