Thursday 15 March 2012

Public Accounting Firm

Hi Platinum
What is public accounting firm? thanks

Shirley

1 comment:

  1. Hi Shirley
    Good question.

    A public accounting firm provides accounting services to the general public. As an accountant, working for a public accounting firm is a career opportunity and you can work with different clients who need accounting work. If you worked here, you might work for many different types of clients across many different industries.

    The other area for an accounting career is commercial accounting. This is where you work for only one entity and do the accounting work for that organisation.

    There are pros and cons for both.

    For public accounting, there is good prestige, especially if you work for a big 4 firm or even a 2nd tier firm as they are large, well known and highly professional. They will look good on your resume because many people know them, eg. PWC, Deloittes, E&Y . The con is that the pay may not be high in the beginning because many people want to enter these firms. They also make you charge time by 6 or 10 minute increments. There is therefore pressure from supervisors who will monitor your ability to produce “chargeable hours” to the client. If you can stay there long enough you might want to try to become a “partner” which is very lucrative, but its very competitive and also you need to be able to bring in clients so your sales skills will need to be strong.

    For commercial accounting firms, the benefit is that you may have less constant pressure, but instead have a lot of month end pressure because these tasks revolve around reporting the financial situation to management in month end reports. The con is that people might become bored of the role because its reasonably repetitive for the same “client”.

    Good luck in your career
    Florian

    ReplyDelete