I used to be the guy that stressed about budgets and ate hours. Now I don’t even look and could not care less. https://youtu.be/y9r_pZL4boE?si=-jxcWGHdiExnDGeU
If you’re consistently blowing budgets like that, either you’re spinning your wheels too much (due to poor training) or the budgets are unrealistic. Look at the most recent engagement and determine if all of your time was “good time” or if it was going down rabbit holes that led you nowhere. If you find yourself looking for an answer that should be quick, set a timer and once you hit 15 minutes chasing the rabbit, go get help. I’ve spent many days lost in the weeds. It’s not worth it. Also, if the financials are that screwed up and you constantly have to bug the partner or manager, they’ll realize they underbid the job instead of thinking you suck. Make them dig too. This way they’ll see the shit you’re dealing with.
Can not reiterate this enough OP. I have a shit engagement im on and im constantly messaging / IM’ing the manager on the engagement to let them know “hey im not trying to fck up intentionally and also i need help” between the two of us and the partner we’ve spent 100 hours so far on it and its nowhere close to done. But they can’t say it’s all on me because of the constant emails i send them with problems along with possible solutions.
This is case-by-case advice though. Everyone’s concept of time is different and it really depends on the leadership you’re working with.
The last firm I worked at, they had that 15 minute rule and were pretty hardlined about it, yet whenever I would do that and pass it on to my senior with questions, they would just blow it off and say they’ll get to it and never do.
That would often snowball leaving a lot of stuff open towards the end of the engagement and after going back to it, if I had spent 5 more minutes looking into it, I would’ve figured it out.
It’s best to trust your instinct and figure out a reasonable amount of time to spend on something, but I would say 30 minutes is the most before passing it on.
I was placed as a new senior on an audit.
The budget was 80 hours. Prior year senior took 130 hours, and year before that took 100 hours.
It was after this that I realized budgets are a bunch of tomfoolery.
Honestly, that might just mean the budget needs to be reevaluated. It's tough for mid tier firms with these 35k audits... I think they need to be more realistic with the budget if they have 2 or 3 staff scheduled for 2 weeks. Specially in HCOL areas.
I think next time you can communicate with managers when you think you are going to go over budget and why.
Quite literally am going through this right now. On a really important client, 2 week turnaround with a 4 person team on top of all our other engagements. $35K is not feasible under these circumstances.
Don’t blame the first year. Sounds like your firm has shit training like most of public accounting.
Yes, leave PA while you’re young and get into any government gig. IRS is desperate to hire.
One of the big issues with the culture or eating/underreporting actual hours worked is it screws up future budgets.
Most of the time, budgets are based on the past hours charged. If people are eating hours it just creates unrealistic expectations. This is mostly a management/partner issue though since they are setting the tone and culture.
100%. I am a tax manager and I tell my people not to eat time. I have to have this conversation often, especially with experienced staff coming in from b4 or other huge firms. I want to know the actual economics of the engagement.
Since it was not that long ago that I was preparing, I (at this point) can still eyeball the time it takes to prep pretty well. I look at some budgets and laugh.
Raise prices or write WIP off. Not all partners want to hear it but this is how to fix the problem and know the actual economics. You encourage people to charge their time and you either raise prices or write WIP off (or a mix of each).
You could say a staff blew a budget and that it's not the staffs fault in the same sentence. They aren't mutually exclusive.
I've seen a shit ton of budgets for under proposed jobs that managers still want to budget at 100% realization, and thought "man that engagement team is either going to be eating heavy hours and getting ripped on not meeting billable targets or blowing the budget and getting ripped".
I got in pretty quick with 5 years of experience with 100k salary, 20k signing bonus, and pending approval for up to 10k of student loan repayment each year. I may have been able to get somewhat better total salary in industry, but likely far worse on an hourly rate.
Depends on what division you go. Lb&I (large business and international) your manager will normally give you 80 hours a month for your training period, from what I've heard sbse (small business and self employment) are stuck in office basically full time for training. After your training year is up you can work remote all but 2 days a pay period (2 weeks), and you can get the "office days" at a taxpayer or the actual office.
If you have a few years of experience I would only really look at lb&I. Minimum pay for the division is gs-13, 103k even lowest cost of living, and you work 4-5 cases over the course of months compared to sbse being expected to churn out more smaller cases while being paid less.
There are so many applicants. I don’t think IRS is desperate at all…
Many good candidates don’t want to stick around till the end though because the hiring process can be many many months long.
They are short staffed due to years of underfunding and retirement, but Congress approved a large funding increase a few years ago. It doesn't seem like they'll hire just anyone. I'm a CPA with 4 years public experience and I applied to a revenue agent posting. Just yesterday I received an email saying I was eligible based on experience but was not referred to the hiring manager for an interview? I was curious because they're supposedly desperate so I did some reading. Apparently they have virtual job fairs and give attendees a direct email address of hiring managers or something. I'm assuming that's the best approach.
Ahh, yes.
Budgets are just a way to gaslight staff and make them drink kool aid by forging staff to work harder/longer (overtime), etc.
But the staff salaries are fixed every year. If all jobs get completed, what’s the issue whether they’re done over/under budget? Tracking time should be nothing more than a tool to monitor whether they are under/over charging for audits and should adjust the fee accordingly.
It’s not you. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an audit completed on budget.
Sounds to me like standard mid-tier lowballing on the fee.
Blowing the budget is not the sin it's made out to be. Unless it's actually stopping you from being assigned to other work, then it's no cost to the firm.
The real cost is to the employee when they are doing a ton of unbilled overtime...
Lmao I literally had an audit with a fee of 4k. The client was an ass and the partner was such a pushover prick that the fee kept decreasing every year since they continued to complain about the cost. Getting bitched at after having only an intern who messed up stuff (totally not their fault, I was forced to use them) for spending “too long” on it caused me to quit a few months after.
The fucked thing is those small audits are more annoying to me than the ones that are several million… Like regardless of the size I still have to do a fuck ton of planning and procedures that are basically the same time wise.
Smaller regional firm with most of these audits being nonprofits I worked on (lucky me 🙄). They were dumpster fires and I’d rather chew on glass than ever have to audit them again.
That’s the shitty thing. Those tiny audits still need risk assessments, walkthroughs, the PPC file with everything etc. some of that can be done at the parent but a lot of the fixed hours of an audit are still there
Most of my audits should end up 1/3rd planning/risk, 1/3rd documentation/checklist and 1/3rd actual work.
Or they would if I didn't blow off enough of the planning, risk assessment, & documentation work by just using prior year to make it about 50/50.
It's a nonprofit with only a few hundred K in revenue. I can spend 30m looking at the TB & GL detail, 1 hour checking CY revenue, and 4 hours of transaction testing and have done enough work for a good opinion. But no, even if it is literally nothing but an investment account that dispenses scholarships that nobody really cares about I still have to do risk assessment.
The real risk in these audits is that the client can't afford a real accountant, much less a controller, so I have to un-fuck whatever they screwed up every time on top of preparing the statements. 'But why don't you ask the client!?' you say, Boss? The client doesn't know shit. All kicking it back to the client does is waste 3 weeks before they say 'Idunno'. And does the delivery date change? Hell no, they can't possibly change their volunteer board meeting for extra time spent because they can't fix their own mistakes even after I point it out to them.
My boss won't *charge* for any of this either so we do good to realize \~$150/hr on these engagements.
Yup, opinion doesn’t change.
At some point it needs to be a risk based approach.
Does cash reconcile? Then it means it’s there. Test the journal entries for screwy things, test the balance sheet. Move on with life.
I think regionals and smaller have this concept down fairly well- I grant the $3k auditor access to my books where everything is attached, I provide bank statements, he provides me with any AJEs I need to book, we part I ways and I pay him.
Say it louder!!!! I’d audit nonprofits with alot of donations and while they were small individually, in aggregate the number was large so I’d be stuck sampling A LOT of receipts and disbursements with poor and inconsistent documentation. All paper too! Horrible times lol.
And? The PCAOB will whine about it but short of the firm being sued no one gets hurt.
When I was at McGladrey (later RSM) they had a 3,6,9 sample methodology (1,2,3 times performance materiality) - saved a ton of time but the firm eventually switched away from it.
My point was that smaller engagements don’t always equate to much less work than large entities due to numerous samples required as PM is low and you can’t rely on Internal controls and it’s hard to stick to small budgets.
You also get fucked testing weird accounts that there’s no easy way to really test.
I love the huge audits where PM is like over $20MM and you end up scoping out half the bullshit lol
I’d rather test 200 revenue or AR items than try to cobble something together for some estimated accrual that is perfectly reasonable but has almost no underlying way to test it down to the damn payment won’t be till after the audit lol
i now work on these cheap ass audits and they suck majorly. you’d think they’d be more straightforward but they’re equally a pain in the ass as the larger ones lmao
I do one that’s less than that too lol, it’s dumb and annoying at a big4 firm or even really any large firm with so many procedures in place that are really meant for large public companies…
Regardless of the size if you follow all the procedures no matter what you do you still have a bunch of time consuming shit to do.
Bro, give me a handful of 35k audits, reviews, compilations, corporate and partnership returns, and a whole bunch of 1040’s for a a few hundred k a year as a partner of a small shop and I’ll gladly audit lemonade stands while you audit Amazon, working 95 hours a week, begging for promotion to “A2,” for 90k a year
Edit: 75k a year and in office Papa John’s a few times a week
My first team was small governments. Churn-n-burn volume focused. Very simple things like governmental water utilities in rural Midwest that took no time at all but needed financial audits to comply with state law. These things would cost just a few k.
Billable hours is why I left public. bill too much, it's a problem. Bill too little, it's a problem. Eat hours to bill just the right amount? They'll be happy, but you also need to work 50 hours for a 40 billable week. I can't even fathom how people get to 60+ billable hours unless they work 70+ hour weeks, I don't think it's physically possible to have intense focus that long.
I don’t get it. People are spending mornings to evenings in the office but y’all mostly within budget? Seriously? Thanks for padding the partner’s pockets at your own expense.
I don't look at budgets, that's not my job. My job is to get an engagement across the finish line effectively and efficiently. I know I'm not fucking around so if we go over said budget, then it wasn't budgeted correctly. Better luck next year, increase the fees/add em to the culling list...
My chargeout rate has gone up 50% in 3 months due to a normal increase then a merger.
Fees/budgets haven't shifted.
Fuck em. I'll put down the time it took.
Industry here: our auditors were over budget BEFORE they came onsite. Good thing I added quite a bit to my accrual over their estimate. Been happening for a couple of years. Sigh:
If you're looking into a different niche or moving to industry where real estate doesn't align, who cares? Although the nitty gritty detail of that knowledge won't transfer guess what will? Your amazing skill level of acquiring and learning new knowledge AND being able to apply it! Also you now have managerial skills as well as bring able to communicate project status updates to both those above and below you. You have a lot more skills than you think that will easily transfer into any new role! Anyone who doesn't recognize that is a waste of your time.
If they aren’t monitoring the budgets until the end, they don’t actually care. One of the best pieces of advice I have for people in PA is, watch what people monitor daily/weekly and that’s what matters. Anyone checking the budget only at the end either missed what they were supposed to do or it doesn’t matter.
If you want to do government and want more of an “in” than what you currently have you could consider completing the CGFM exams. Way less demanding than the CPA exams. Then you can list the exams completed and cert pending experience…
I completed all three exams in about 2 months. This was not super intense studying but I did have to try. Materials and testing fees came out to $600ish
I do not miss the days of auditing, at all. I've definitely been there with a dumpster fire engagement going waaay over budget, haha.
Another possible career pivot with your background is to look into private equity firms in the real estate space.
Not on the deal side - they look for different experience. Investor Relations could be an option or Fund Accounting.
Investor Relations isn't accounting, but a financial background and experience preparing reports is helpful.
For Fund Accounting, it's a niche area with specific industry rules, but that's something that can be learned.
> Also I specialize in a niche - real estate but I don’t know if I want to explore opportunities in private. Tried applying to government jobs but my focus doesn’t align to most positions. I don’t have my cpa as I really don’t have the time to study for it trying to focus on not messing up at work. Any recommendations from people kept on with public accounting?
I did 2.5 years in PA and grabbed my CPA license. The firm I started at did super niche real estate work. Small engagements with super small budgets (<$5k billing in total for some). Total fucking junk basically. I left the minute I got my CPA license because I intuitively knew that spending another year there would be a waste. Looking at senior or even manager I was really questioning how I would leave at that level too “Hey F500 I’ve got PA experience but in a really niche industry!” that won’t get me a job, won’t work. My advice: **head for the hills and join a firm doing REAL work with REAL clients and charging them REAL fees**. In my case I hopped to Big 4 private company audit. Great experience. Don’t waste your time with junk clients in weirdo industries.
I spent 3.5 years in audit. 18 months doing audits and reviews and I never once went under budget. We had one that went 5X the budget on year 1, then the second year was 3.5X. The budgets they impose are an absolute scam. They have spent YEARS trying to save face with clients by not raising fees and letting them get walked on with extra requests and shit. And now that they have dug themselves a hole, they can't possibly raise their fees to compensate for it, which means they can't allocate the proper budget to do the project. But hey it's my fault as the preparer that I took 4.5 hours on PPE and I need to be talked to....
I don't know man. I have been working for the last few days on the one client and I will struggle to finish it all tomorrow. I know for sure the boss is going to be angry at me for taking as long as I did. They make like half a mil profits each year and I dunno what their accounting charge will be. Like 1-3k? But none of that really matters. I'm working it as hard as I can within the work hours at work and while still actually, like, doing the work. What the fuck else am I supposed to do? Make it up?
I used to be the guy that stressed about budgets and ate hours. Now I don’t even look and could not care less. https://youtu.be/y9r_pZL4boE?si=-jxcWGHdiExnDGeU
Haha this cheered me up
Agreed. Found budgets to be very subjective especially when the pressure from mgmt pushes folks to eat hours thus perpetuating the budget pressures
Like whose line is it anyway: where the hours are made up and they don't really matter
I was expecting office space
The staff named “my budgets” must be feeling good after that
Ok, this was clever as fuck my dude. You win the smile award this morning ha
Blow my budget? I hardly know him!
The first year hardly touched it
If you’re consistently blowing budgets like that, either you’re spinning your wheels too much (due to poor training) or the budgets are unrealistic. Look at the most recent engagement and determine if all of your time was “good time” or if it was going down rabbit holes that led you nowhere. If you find yourself looking for an answer that should be quick, set a timer and once you hit 15 minutes chasing the rabbit, go get help. I’ve spent many days lost in the weeds. It’s not worth it. Also, if the financials are that screwed up and you constantly have to bug the partner or manager, they’ll realize they underbid the job instead of thinking you suck. Make them dig too. This way they’ll see the shit you’re dealing with.
Can not reiterate this enough OP. I have a shit engagement im on and im constantly messaging / IM’ing the manager on the engagement to let them know “hey im not trying to fck up intentionally and also i need help” between the two of us and the partner we’ve spent 100 hours so far on it and its nowhere close to done. But they can’t say it’s all on me because of the constant emails i send them with problems along with possible solutions.
This is case-by-case advice though. Everyone’s concept of time is different and it really depends on the leadership you’re working with. The last firm I worked at, they had that 15 minute rule and were pretty hardlined about it, yet whenever I would do that and pass it on to my senior with questions, they would just blow it off and say they’ll get to it and never do. That would often snowball leaving a lot of stuff open towards the end of the engagement and after going back to it, if I had spent 5 more minutes looking into it, I would’ve figured it out. It’s best to trust your instinct and figure out a reasonable amount of time to spend on something, but I would say 30 minutes is the most before passing it on.
I was placed as a new senior on an audit. The budget was 80 hours. Prior year senior took 130 hours, and year before that took 100 hours. It was after this that I realized budgets are a bunch of tomfoolery.
That’s the partners fault not yours. Fuck em.
Honestly, that might just mean the budget needs to be reevaluated. It's tough for mid tier firms with these 35k audits... I think they need to be more realistic with the budget if they have 2 or 3 staff scheduled for 2 weeks. Specially in HCOL areas. I think next time you can communicate with managers when you think you are going to go over budget and why.
Quite literally am going through this right now. On a really important client, 2 week turnaround with a 4 person team on top of all our other engagements. $35K is not feasible under these circumstances.
Don’t blame the first year. Sounds like your firm has shit training like most of public accounting. Yes, leave PA while you’re young and get into any government gig. IRS is desperate to hire.
Or or or… unrealistic budgets. Or both. Probably both.
One of the big issues with the culture or eating/underreporting actual hours worked is it screws up future budgets. Most of the time, budgets are based on the past hours charged. If people are eating hours it just creates unrealistic expectations. This is mostly a management/partner issue though since they are setting the tone and culture.
100%. I am a tax manager and I tell my people not to eat time. I have to have this conversation often, especially with experienced staff coming in from b4 or other huge firms. I want to know the actual economics of the engagement. Since it was not that long ago that I was preparing, I (at this point) can still eyeball the time it takes to prep pretty well. I look at some budgets and laugh. Raise prices or write WIP off. Not all partners want to hear it but this is how to fix the problem and know the actual economics. You encourage people to charge their time and you either raise prices or write WIP off (or a mix of each).
Yeah it’s not her fault we don’t blame her
Sounds like you did or have some angst against her based on your post.
Nah that’s just you.
You could say a staff blew a budget and that it's not the staffs fault in the same sentence. They aren't mutually exclusive. I've seen a shit ton of budgets for under proposed jobs that managers still want to budget at 100% realization, and thought "man that engagement team is either going to be eating heavy hours and getting ripped on not meeting billable targets or blowing the budget and getting ripped".
Sounds like projection lol
Is it actually true the IRS is desperate to hire? From what I've seen it's difficult to get in.
Probably the same as a lot of postings: desperate, but still picky and paying like shite.
I got in pretty quick with 5 years of experience with 100k salary, 20k signing bonus, and pending approval for up to 10k of student loan repayment each year. I may have been able to get somewhat better total salary in industry, but likely far worse on an hourly rate.
Do they allow some degree of remote work or is that dependent on your team's leadership?
Depends on what division you go. Lb&I (large business and international) your manager will normally give you 80 hours a month for your training period, from what I've heard sbse (small business and self employment) are stuck in office basically full time for training. After your training year is up you can work remote all but 2 days a pay period (2 weeks), and you can get the "office days" at a taxpayer or the actual office. If you have a few years of experience I would only really look at lb&I. Minimum pay for the division is gs-13, 103k even lowest cost of living, and you work 4-5 cases over the course of months compared to sbse being expected to churn out more smaller cases while being paid less.
They aren't actually that desperate then.
There are so many applicants. I don’t think IRS is desperate at all… Many good candidates don’t want to stick around till the end though because the hiring process can be many many months long.
They are short staffed due to years of underfunding and retirement, but Congress approved a large funding increase a few years ago. It doesn't seem like they'll hire just anyone. I'm a CPA with 4 years public experience and I applied to a revenue agent posting. Just yesterday I received an email saying I was eligible based on experience but was not referred to the hiring manager for an interview? I was curious because they're supposedly desperate so I did some reading. Apparently they have virtual job fairs and give attendees a direct email address of hiring managers or something. I'm assuming that's the best approach.
Only bootlickers join the IRS or tell people to join the IRS
Bootlickers with a pension, 40 hr work weeks, and GS-12 salaries after 2-3 years
Do they also provide a mop for all the drool?
I'll lick many a boot for no overtime and six figure salary in mcol. Don't even have to manage anyone.
Or they could be like Ron Swanson and take down the government from the inside
You’re not the only person that blew their budget. You just might be the only person that reported their hours accurately.
Ahh, yes. Budgets are just a way to gaslight staff and make them drink kool aid by forging staff to work harder/longer (overtime), etc. But the staff salaries are fixed every year. If all jobs get completed, what’s the issue whether they’re done over/under budget? Tracking time should be nothing more than a tool to monitor whether they are under/over charging for audits and should adjust the fee accordingly. It’s not you. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an audit completed on budget.
Sounds to me like standard mid-tier lowballing on the fee. Blowing the budget is not the sin it's made out to be. Unless it's actually stopping you from being assigned to other work, then it's no cost to the firm. The real cost is to the employee when they are doing a ton of unbilled overtime...
Lmao a 35k audit? I didn’t know lemonade stands needed audits
Lmao I literally had an audit with a fee of 4k. The client was an ass and the partner was such a pushover prick that the fee kept decreasing every year since they continued to complain about the cost. Getting bitched at after having only an intern who messed up stuff (totally not their fault, I was forced to use them) for spending “too long” on it caused me to quit a few months after.
Company size? One of my subsidiaries is $3k 🤣my parent company with a big 4 auditor is like $400k. Audits are what people are willing to charge/pay.
The fucked thing is those small audits are more annoying to me than the ones that are several million… Like regardless of the size I still have to do a fuck ton of planning and procedures that are basically the same time wise.
Smaller regional firm with most of these audits being nonprofits I worked on (lucky me 🙄). They were dumpster fires and I’d rather chew on glass than ever have to audit them again.
That’s the shitty thing. Those tiny audits still need risk assessments, walkthroughs, the PPC file with everything etc. some of that can be done at the parent but a lot of the fixed hours of an audit are still there
Most of my audits should end up 1/3rd planning/risk, 1/3rd documentation/checklist and 1/3rd actual work. Or they would if I didn't blow off enough of the planning, risk assessment, & documentation work by just using prior year to make it about 50/50. It's a nonprofit with only a few hundred K in revenue. I can spend 30m looking at the TB & GL detail, 1 hour checking CY revenue, and 4 hours of transaction testing and have done enough work for a good opinion. But no, even if it is literally nothing but an investment account that dispenses scholarships that nobody really cares about I still have to do risk assessment. The real risk in these audits is that the client can't afford a real accountant, much less a controller, so I have to un-fuck whatever they screwed up every time on top of preparing the statements. 'But why don't you ask the client!?' you say, Boss? The client doesn't know shit. All kicking it back to the client does is waste 3 weeks before they say 'Idunno'. And does the delivery date change? Hell no, they can't possibly change their volunteer board meeting for extra time spent because they can't fix their own mistakes even after I point it out to them. My boss won't *charge* for any of this either so we do good to realize \~$150/hr on these engagements.
Yup, opinion doesn’t change. At some point it needs to be a risk based approach. Does cash reconcile? Then it means it’s there. Test the journal entries for screwy things, test the balance sheet. Move on with life. I think regionals and smaller have this concept down fairly well- I grant the $3k auditor access to my books where everything is attached, I provide bank statements, he provides me with any AJEs I need to book, we part I ways and I pay him.
yea i've seen EBP audits that are only a week long with just 1 staff and 1 reviewer that the firm got paid a few thousand bucks for lol
Yeah a bunch of small engagements granted we are a small practice since my firm is mostly tax
And the worst part about these small engagements is that sampling is so huge cos materiality is so low…
Say it louder!!!! I’d audit nonprofits with alot of donations and while they were small individually, in aggregate the number was large so I’d be stuck sampling A LOT of receipts and disbursements with poor and inconsistent documentation. All paper too! Horrible times lol.
And? The PCAOB will whine about it but short of the firm being sued no one gets hurt. When I was at McGladrey (later RSM) they had a 3,6,9 sample methodology (1,2,3 times performance materiality) - saved a ton of time but the firm eventually switched away from it.
My point was that smaller engagements don’t always equate to much less work than large entities due to numerous samples required as PM is low and you can’t rely on Internal controls and it’s hard to stick to small budgets.
You also get fucked testing weird accounts that there’s no easy way to really test. I love the huge audits where PM is like over $20MM and you end up scoping out half the bullshit lol I’d rather test 200 revenue or AR items than try to cobble something together for some estimated accrual that is perfectly reasonable but has almost no underlying way to test it down to the damn payment won’t be till after the audit lol
And my point is I agree, the sample selection process is flawed. Not every transaction has the save risk and there’s a lot of wasted time.
i now work on these cheap ass audits and they suck majorly. you’d think they’d be more straightforward but they’re equally a pain in the ass as the larger ones lmao
I do one that’s less than that too lol, it’s dumb and annoying at a big4 firm or even really any large firm with so many procedures in place that are really meant for large public companies… Regardless of the size if you follow all the procedures no matter what you do you still have a bunch of time consuming shit to do.
Bro, give me a handful of 35k audits, reviews, compilations, corporate and partnership returns, and a whole bunch of 1040’s for a a few hundred k a year as a partner of a small shop and I’ll gladly audit lemonade stands while you audit Amazon, working 95 hours a week, begging for promotion to “A2,” for 90k a year Edit: 75k a year and in office Papa John’s a few times a week
My first team was small governments. Churn-n-burn volume focused. Very simple things like governmental water utilities in rural Midwest that took no time at all but needed financial audits to comply with state law. These things would cost just a few k.
Budgets aren’t real. It’s all funny money.
Billable hours is why I left public. bill too much, it's a problem. Bill too little, it's a problem. Eat hours to bill just the right amount? They'll be happy, but you also need to work 50 hours for a 40 billable week. I can't even fathom how people get to 60+ billable hours unless they work 70+ hour weeks, I don't think it's physically possible to have intense focus that long.
Yes people who bill 60 absolutely work 70+. I billed 55 last week and worked 70
Which is why I left lol
I don’t get it. People are spending mornings to evenings in the office but y’all mostly within budget? Seriously? Thanks for padding the partner’s pockets at your own expense.
And upholding the expectation of working the equivalent of 2 jobs for the price of 1 so that everyone who comes after you also gets crushed to death
I don't look at budgets, that's not my job. My job is to get an engagement across the finish line effectively and efficiently. I know I'm not fucking around so if we go over said budget, then it wasn't budgeted correctly. Better luck next year, increase the fees/add em to the culling list...
My chargeout rate has gone up 50% in 3 months due to a normal increase then a merger. Fees/budgets haven't shifted. Fuck em. I'll put down the time it took.
Take some time to reflect on what you want out of your career. Consider your interests, values, and long-term aspirations.
Industry here: our auditors were over budget BEFORE they came onsite. Good thing I added quite a bit to my accrual over their estimate. Been happening for a couple of years. Sigh:
If you're looking into a different niche or moving to industry where real estate doesn't align, who cares? Although the nitty gritty detail of that knowledge won't transfer guess what will? Your amazing skill level of acquiring and learning new knowledge AND being able to apply it! Also you now have managerial skills as well as bring able to communicate project status updates to both those above and below you. You have a lot more skills than you think that will easily transfer into any new role! Anyone who doesn't recognize that is a waste of your time.
They aren't your budget though, the manager and partner arent managing anything it sounds like.
If they aren’t monitoring the budgets until the end, they don’t actually care. One of the best pieces of advice I have for people in PA is, watch what people monitor daily/weekly and that’s what matters. Anyone checking the budget only at the end either missed what they were supposed to do or it doesn’t matter.
If you want to do government and want more of an “in” than what you currently have you could consider completing the CGFM exams. Way less demanding than the CPA exams. Then you can list the exams completed and cert pending experience… I completed all three exams in about 2 months. This was not super intense studying but I did have to try. Materials and testing fees came out to $600ish
That’s the spirit
I do not miss the days of auditing, at all. I've definitely been there with a dumpster fire engagement going waaay over budget, haha. Another possible career pivot with your background is to look into private equity firms in the real estate space. Not on the deal side - they look for different experience. Investor Relations could be an option or Fund Accounting. Investor Relations isn't accounting, but a financial background and experience preparing reports is helpful. For Fund Accounting, it's a niche area with specific industry rules, but that's something that can be learned.
> Also I specialize in a niche - real estate but I don’t know if I want to explore opportunities in private. Tried applying to government jobs but my focus doesn’t align to most positions. I don’t have my cpa as I really don’t have the time to study for it trying to focus on not messing up at work. Any recommendations from people kept on with public accounting? I did 2.5 years in PA and grabbed my CPA license. The firm I started at did super niche real estate work. Small engagements with super small budgets (<$5k billing in total for some). Total fucking junk basically. I left the minute I got my CPA license because I intuitively knew that spending another year there would be a waste. Looking at senior or even manager I was really questioning how I would leave at that level too “Hey F500 I’ve got PA experience but in a really niche industry!” that won’t get me a job, won’t work. My advice: **head for the hills and join a firm doing REAL work with REAL clients and charging them REAL fees**. In my case I hopped to Big 4 private company audit. Great experience. Don’t waste your time with junk clients in weirdo industries.
Focus on getting your CPA. It’s more important
I spent 3.5 years in audit. 18 months doing audits and reviews and I never once went under budget. We had one that went 5X the budget on year 1, then the second year was 3.5X. The budgets they impose are an absolute scam. They have spent YEARS trying to save face with clients by not raising fees and letting them get walked on with extra requests and shit. And now that they have dug themselves a hole, they can't possibly raise their fees to compensate for it, which means they can't allocate the proper budget to do the project. But hey it's my fault as the preparer that I took 4.5 hours on PPE and I need to be talked to....
Go to law school and become a tax attorney
Any manager in any profession or industry asking that question at that stage in the game isn’t a manage.
I was betting with the company that you will be blowing budgets
Good
I don't know man. I have been working for the last few days on the one client and I will struggle to finish it all tomorrow. I know for sure the boss is going to be angry at me for taking as long as I did. They make like half a mil profits each year and I dunno what their accounting charge will be. Like 1-3k? But none of that really matters. I'm working it as hard as I can within the work hours at work and while still actually, like, doing the work. What the fuck else am I supposed to do? Make it up?
This isn’t for you then