[Easy_C]

(12-28-2016 03:01 AM)dallasguy Wrote:  

Big 4 sucks the life out of you. We're talking up to 100 hours a week during busy season. All of the partners at my firm came from the big 5. They still have contacts at those firms. No new partners have been made in years. You can still make director and pull $250K.

You won't have to put in as many hours at a regional. Better work life balance. Get your training and experience there then move on or else you'll wake up at age 45 wondering what you did the past 10-15 years. You can always make money, but you can never buy your youth back.

That sounds more like IB than Big 4.

[Easy_C]

(01-07-2017 02:54 PM)Thomas Jackson Wrote:  

(01-07-2017 01:24 PM)speeddemon Wrote:  

(01-07-2017 08:30 AM)Thomas Jackson Wrote:  

Accounting is a good stable career with a ton of benefits, but starting in the Big 4 in your 30's would be pretty terrible. You would have to be completely okay with doing grunt work and getting supervised by a 24 year old with no life experience. I am a manager in a national firm (GT, RSM, BDO) so I feel i have a decent perspective here.

Do you know of any colleagues who have transitioned into investment banking after their stint at a Big 4 / national firm?

Yes - it is hard but doable. A guy i went to college with did it (from PWC) and another guy I formerly worked with did it. Both via networking. The didn't go to GS or anything like that though, but smaller niche I-banks. You won't want to stay in public long if you want to do this. Another way is to do 2 years of audit, switch to transaction advisory for a couple years and then either go get a top MBA or go directly to a smaller bank.

I know a guy who lateralled to CitiBank IB after working in Big 4.

How doable it is depends on the job market. Banks tend to overreact in both directions. In a down economy it will be damn near impossible, in a good one the banks are scrambling for anyone who has a basic financial competency because they fired too many people in the first place.

[RealDeal]

(01-08-2017 09:55 AM)Thomas Jackson Wrote:  

(01-07-2017 11:31 PM)RealDeal Wrote:  

I'm thinking of going back to school as well and getting into accounting but I will probably take the the short term 2 year diploma route instead. I'd be alright with a bookkeeper or payroll admin type of job.

This is a relatively deadend route. I would not recommend it. You won't make much and will be doing extremely boring low level work.

That may be true but I plan on doing this all part time while working full time. Getting a diploma will take me at least 4 years and if I plan on getting a bachelors instead it will take me 8. That means I'd have my degree by the time I'm 36/37. Maybe it would be worth it in the end but I can't imagine myself going to school for 8 years.

[RealDeal]

CPA here in Canada also offers ACAF certification for diploma holders. Don't know if it's worth it though.

https://www.cpacanada.ca/en/cpa-canada-a...et-an-acaf

[dallasguy]

Yeah those big 4 dropouts started their own firm and now have private jets and are worth 8 figures while you're still hacking it making money for someone else.

All he needs to do is look at the turnover rate at the big 4. Look at the reviews on glassdoor.

[dallasguy]

Perhsps you have a reading comprehension problem. My advice to him was to start at a big 4 if possible then move on. There is no chance to make partner. By hiring manager, you mean work in HR with the women?

[Jack Of All Trades]

Don't most guys working big4 transition to industry? I've got 2 friends at big4, 1 washed out and the other is on the brink after 3 years. They actually try to steer me away from accounting, they admitted your salary in a big city in canada gets capped at around 80-90k a year which isn't bad until he mentioned the working hours and how your treated.

[dallasguy]

That's why the big 4 have such high turnover rates. Most people work there a few years for the experience and resume. The smart ones leave for a better job that pays more or start their own firm and get rich. If you think about it, a manager there makes about the same hourly as a senior IRS agent when you add in benefits. Rewarding job indee LOL

[Jack Of All Trades]

I heard that a new manager at big4 makes like 70k CAD, which I found ridiculous. They also have no benefits unlike IRS agents to fall back on. They barely have matching or pensions or anything, it was really eye opening when my friend sat me down and gave me the spiel about accounting and why he went somewhere else.

[frozen-ace]

Big4 gives you 5 weeks paid vacation starting out, plus holidays, plus "rolling" of hours if you have been working a ton (similar to "comp" time except you are salaried, lets say you wrap up on a Wed so you take Thurs and Friday off, off the books, don't take any PTO to make up for all the insane OT you were working).

Once you hit senior manager it bumps up to 6 weeks (each firm slightly different but overall very generous with paid vacation).

I had a friend who took a two month sabbatical every year, so really he was only working about 8 months out of every 12. Not bad.

Once you jump ship you get better pay but it is pretty tough going from 5 weeks PTO down to 2.

[Jack Of All Trades]

Is this the standard norm in the USA? I haven't heard of anything like this in Canada

[frozen-ace]

^
Yes. Big4 gives you a ton of vacation. The firms are all pretty comparable in that regard (I think some might "only" give 4 weeks instead of 5). It is an attempt to make up for the lack of life balance with the crazy work hours.

Better to be in a chill office and work 40 hour weeks and get all that vacation than working in NYC on a bank audit and never seeing the inside of your eye lids and get the same vacation.

[dallasguy]

What firm gives only 2 weeks PTO? I've never heard of such a thing. My firm starts off with 20 + 2 floating. A manager gets 28 + 2.

We're at open PTO now. Take as much time off as you want as long as you complete your assignments. We also get 100% matching up to 4% for retirement.

[Jack Of All Trades]

well I guess Big4 isn't so bad after then, why's the turnover rate so high with matching pension, and so much time off?

[Cattle Rustler]

Most companies give 3 weeks....2 vacation and 1 sickness week. Most companies won't give a shit about how you use your illness days but some will ask for a doctor's note, especially if you have an asshole for a manager.

[dallasguy]

Look at reviews on glassdoor

[dallasguy]

Doctors note is usually if you're out a week or so. Most people with a cold or flu just stay home and rest. I never had a request for a note in 20+ years of work

[mpr]

It's pretty good to hear that there are RVFer's doing the same thing I am. I'm in my 30's and am going back to school for my CPA. I had a degree in Finance before I started so I don't have to take nearly as many classes as someone without a business degree.

I'm only 4 classes away from getting a degree in accounting, and obtaining the required 150 credit hours needed to become a CPA. Anyone who's studying or about to study for the CPA exams should hit me up. Maybe we could help each other out by sharing study materials.

[dallasguy]

My advice is to use Becker and you will pass.

[mpr]

(01-13-2017 08:50 PM)dallasguy Wrote:  

My advice is to use Becker and you will pass.

Yeah the cost is a motherfucker though. I've heard good things about Gleim and the price of their training materials is significantly less. I'm going to try and find a current bootleg version of Becker. That could be hard though.

[Armogan]

I'm not sure where the "you won't make partner comes from". Do firms not have mandatory partner retirements? Do they not need partners to sell work. Of course they make new partners, I'm sure it's just a massive grind. If you get in over 30 as an entry level perhaps partner is out of reach.

[dallasguy]

Sorry I meant new partners as in growing the firm. Of course if someone dies or retires they will be replaced. I hear it's fewer than 50 per year for each firm. With 80,000 employees, you have almost zero chance. You basically hope that someone gets sick or dies so you can apply against 100 other senior managers.

[dallasguy]

Gleim is horrible. Becker is the best followed by Wiley.

[dallasguy]

Find a job at a CPA firm. Most regionals and nationals will pay for Becker study material. I used a 3 year old bootleg copy and passed.

[Jean Valjean]

From this thread, it's now evident that I really was stumbling around in how I went about pursuing my accounting career.. I started out by getting a management degree (which was dumb; I should've gotten an accounting degree, because you can be a manager with an accounting degree, but you can't get a CPA without accounting credits). Through school, I worked as a cashier at burger places, I guess because I didn't realize there were accounting internship opportunities out there that could've jump-started my career. I suppose I should've been talking to the university career counselors while I was still progressing through school, rather than waiting till after graduation.

After graduating, I did temp work in corporate accounts payable, and eventually went back to school to get some accounting credits and become a CPA. As a newly-minted CPA, senior corporate accountants and CFOs were willing to teach me some more advanced stuff like fixed assets, but then I jumped into public accounting at a small local firm to see what that world was like, and found it can be a lot tougher to be a revenue-generator than a part of corporate overhead. It didn't help that I was working for an owner who tended to fire almost all of his employees for not meeting his standards. I ended up being among those who got the ax (partly because, at that time, I belonged to a strict religion that didn't allow me to work on the Sabbath, even during tax season, and he didn't remember me bringing that up during the job interview). So, I went back to corporate accounting.

There came a point, though, where I was no longer a new CPA, and I was starting to get typecast as an accounts payable guy rather than being groomed for advancement. Also, job interviewers were starting to ask, "Why aren't you a senior accountant by this point in your career?" Eventually, I had to lie on my resume just to be able to claim enough higher-level experience to get into a staff accountant role. After doing accounts payable for almost 13 years, that feels like a big deal to me, but in reality, staff accountant is just the entry-level position in public accounting, so I could've been at this point many years ago if I'd made the right decisions. Now I'm probably going to have to lie on my resume again in order to get into a more senior position someplace.

By the way, in this day and age where you can take the CPA exam one section at a time, and you can retake a failed section in the next quarter, taking a course like Becker is probably not as big a deal as it used to be. I just kept taking the test sections and then doing a brain dump immediately afterwards of what was on the test, and researching to find out the answers for next time.

Also, once you get your CPA, the most efficient way to keep it is to get your CPE from an online program like MasterCPE that lets you take unlimited classes for a flat annual fee. You can keep the final exam open in one window, and do a text search for the answers in the study guide in another window, and get about 10 CPE hours for every hour you invest in doing this. Not that it matters much once you get that first corporate accounting job; most corporate CPAs I know just let their license lapse because no one cares about it at that point.

tl;dr: Get an internship while pursuing your accounting degree, get your CPA, work for the Big Four, and then go into corporate accounting or something, and you'll probably do fine. I'm not sure age matters as much as just not wasting time through unnecessary detours or spinning your wheels during your journey, because then your lack of speedy advancement starts to make it look like maybe you're not a top performer.