The Accounting Industry - Overview

Well, it turns out that accounting isn’t that boring after all. Although those considering audit might want to take a careful look at what’s involved.

Accountancy was cited by almost everyone as a brilliant place to get a solid understanding of business and many people exploit the training as a springboard into other careers both within finance and more broadly (such as management consultancy). This makes it a pretty good option for those who aren’t entirely sure which direction to take but who want a solid qualification from which to build.

The exact qualification you sign-up to will depend on what interests you and what slant you want your training to have. Typically at the big 4 you’ll be going for the ACA, which probably has the edge in terms of prestige. If you’re interested in being an accountant within a business then you’ll be heading in the direction of CIMA. Public service has its own specialised training and that’s CIPFA.

Something that may seem a little counter intuitive is that you don’t actually have to be a math geek to be successful in this industry. Whilst it might help for more specialized areas such as tax and actuarial work, most people we spoke to didn’t have a clue what the whole top row of a calculator does!

To find out more about graduate jobs in accounting and finance, check out the videos below:

Graduate Jobs in Audit

Graduate Jobs in Tax

Graduate Jobs in Forensic Accounting

Graduate Jobs in Transaction Services

Graduate Jobs in Corporate Finance

An insight into the Accounting Industry.

Graduate Jobs in Accounting and Finance.

My name is Alex Davis i look after finance for Flight Centre UK Ltd. My name is Gemma Yuill, i'm an audit manager and i work for Deloitte and Touche LLP. My name is Matt Sevenoaks and i work in the forensic department of KPMG. My name is Sophie Hill, i'm lead partner for the southern region of BDO Stoy Hayward. I am Sarah Tomlinson, i work within the international assignment solutions department within tax at Deloitte in Reading. My name is Nicola Ramage, i work at the Financial Services Authority, i'm a management accountant and i'm executive assistant to the finance director.

An accountant is somebody who has a focus on the results and the figures, the financial information that a company creates in order to be able to say “are those figures correct?” and also what do we want to do with those figures, so what does it tell the business that they need to do going forwards to make the profit figures larger.

To me an accountant is a business advisor. It’s somebody who really understands the different challenges in business in different types of businesses and at different points of their evolution.

Accountancy is basically taking people’s information and putting it into a format that they need and can use and they need this to see how their business is doing and they need it because they need to file returns to the government to tell them how they’re doing.

So you’ve got two main accounting areas, one of them is a chartered accountant where they work in for example, PWC or Deloitte, and they are in that business and they go and work in other businesses and go and audit their accounts or help them out in projects. What a management accountant does is actually run the business so have we got enough money to pay everyone, how much are we spending? If you want to run a project or hire somebody we work through the numbers for that.

An accountant is quite a broad training and people tend to specialise once they’ve qualified. Some people specialise into tax, some into corporate finance which is looking into companies buying other companies or merging essentially, some stay within chartered accountancy which is looking at other companies results and verifying those. Then you’ve got management and financial accountants which tend to be people who have done the qualifications but then move into a company and help them produce their own accounts and set budgets and that sort of thing. There are also a number of other streams such as risk management where people who have trained as accountants then go off into looking at what are the risks to a company in terms of hitting their profit figures and that sort of thing.

There are also a few niche areas such as forensic auditing and forensic accounting which are kind of very specialist. You can also get into actual area work and that’s to do with pension funds and working out how much they’re worth.

We’re classed as external auditors so we go in and check what our clients are doing. Pretty much our job is to make sure that our client’s statutory accounts are true and fair so they’re not reporting anything that’s incorrect that could affect their shareholders decisions. What that entails is basically going out to client sites, looking at their numbers, performing specific procedures to ensure they’re right.

What you’re doing there is looking at a companyies results, the results have already happened in a sense; they’ve had their year of trading. You’re looking at those results and saying, do we agree with them, yes or no?

We see insights into all types of businesses and the challenges that businesses face at different points of their evolution so when we’re with clients we can be discussing a whole broad range of subjects, whether it’s people matters, systems matters, their overall aspirations as individual owners or the management successions planning, so it can be a whole range of different matters that impact businesses at different stages of their development.

I wasn’t really interested in being in a company where you go out and help other companies and then come back again because you don’t really get to see how it’s running and how it’s all working, you help one specific part or audit the numbers of one specific company - I wanted to feel more involved in the company.

I head up finance for Flight Centre which means I look after the team of accountants who support our team of operational people who are the travel agents who are out in all the stores in all the high streets selling travel and my team looks after the financial side of things, so looking after the numbers, providing business support, providing commercial advice because now what I’m helping to do is helping the company decide what it’s going to do on a day to day basis, what it’s strategy should be looking forwards and that’s very exciting, that’s great because you’re really helping to decide what may work for us as a business, how we can make it even more of a success.

If you worked with a smaller firm you may just be in a department called “Tax” and it would probably deal with a bit of everything. If you worked with a bigger firm you are going to be specialised. Corporation tax is really focused on what companies are paying at the end of the day for their tax bill, private clients is looking at wealthy individuals so we have a lot of famous people for example, lots of football players as clients. We manage their personal tax bill, VAT is reducing the VAT and allowing companies to reclaim as much as possible and in terms of employer taxes, that’s things like developing really tax efficient share option plans or allowing companies to make terminations for their employees in the most tax efficient way and then again international tax which is what I am in, is for allowing companies to send their key employees all around the world in the most tax efficient and compliant way.

It’s quite varied in terms of my role within Forensic but to break it down, I get involved with investigations so that can be whereby the client contacts us to say they suspect there has been a fraud within their business or they may also contact us saying that they believe they might have actually broken some regulatory rules and they want us to go in and do an investigation and form an opinion as to whether that has occurred and to produce a factual report stating what we actually believe has occurred based on the evidence we do collate.

There are various different types of accountancy qualifications. The one I chose was chartered accountant which is ACA. Normally you do that when you’re working for an accountancy firm, so someone like PWC who is providing the services to clients. There are other ones which are maybe more suited to people who are just working in industry so CIMA is one example and also ACCA which cover the same ground but in a slightly different way. Typically people who are doing those will do it from within Flight Centre or any other company.

The qualification works out that you have to take a number of exams over a two or two and a half year period and Deloitte will sponsor you through that and arrange your tuition and that sort of thing. Then you have to do 3 years work experience as well. Once you’ve done that then you can apply for your membership to the Institute of Chartered Accountants.

There are different types of accountants so there are those with the big chartered accountancy firms; there are those like me in industry at the moment and there are also those who work for very small high street operations.

I think one of the main advantages of working for a smaller firm, certainly the firm I work for is that the hours are very regular so it’s literally a 9 till 5.30 and at 5.30 you pack up and go home. Very occasionally if there is a tight deadline you might work a little bit later but apart from that you are not going to be working weekends.

I do sometimes have to work overtime and I won’t say I’ve never worked over the weekend but that’s just part of the job and because of the flexibility, I don’t mind it.

The profession has become more flexible and BDO certainly encourages flexible working.

The girl who sits on my left is from Nigeria, the girl on my right is from Texas, there are lots of Brits there as well but we have a real mix of cultures which to me always adds value.

One of our main sectors of clients is natural resources which obviously most of our clients are based out in the Middle East, there are people out in Abu Dhabi at the moment, they’ve been out there for about four weeks, so there’s lots of opportunities for away jobs abroad.

The worst bit is probably repetitive work, sometimes on the book-keeping side it can get a little bit boring and mundane but once you’ve got it done it's out of the way.

I think for me the most fun part of the job is going to visit other clients, going to differnt offices, seeing how different businesses are run, see how different people do their job. One week I’ll be in central London, next week I’ll be in the office and the week after that I’ll be in Heathrow or Oxford, so there’s a real variety to the work.

To get into accountancy in the first place I didn’t have a specific degree requirement, I didn’t have a specific result of that so I did modern languages which is nothing to do with accountancy whatsoever and I just went through the standard graduate interview process, was successful in that and started doing the accountancy qualifications and exams.

We have one scheme which is after A-Levels where people can come in and work for a year, it’s called the CTS or commercial training scheme so you can then work for the year and then join the graduate programme so if you didn’t want to go to university, it’s a quicker route to being qualified as an accountant – it takes 4 years rather than 3 years at university and then 3 years studying at a firm.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re working for one of the big companies or a smaller regional company; they will probably send you off to the same college. Essentially there are two colleges that seem to do it, there is Kaplan and BPP.

You’ve definitely got to have an eye for detail because you’re sometimes trying to look for something very specific so for example if you’re doing an onsite client raid and you’re looking through an entire office, you obviously need to have a specification of what you’re looking for but then you need to actually be able to find it. You also need to then be able to make quite quick decision because if you’re in a room with 30 boxes in it and you’ve only got a day to get it done you need to be quite brutal and say, ok, is this box really going to contain the sort of stuff I’m looking for, no - move on, otherwise you could be there for days just trying to get the job done.

The other key skill you need more so as a management accountant is being able to explain to people what you are talking about in terms that they can understand because not everyone understands finances or numbers.

I think you really need to be thinking about not only your academics but other stuff that you do within university or outside of university that shows you have other strings to your bow really.