Chartered Accountant - Philip Kemp

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!

Who are you and what do you do?

My name is Phil, I'm a chartered accountant and I work for a small regional firm in Maidenhead.

What is Accountancy?

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

What attracted you to this career?

I did quite a financial degree; I did economics and politics so kind of looked to something like that I could leap from that into, looked at various office jobs and the ones that stood out were the more financial jobs so I looked around and accountancy seemed like quite a good thing to get into.

What does your job involve?

Mostly we do accounts preparation work so lots of small companies and larger companies need accounts prepared because they need to send it off to the government for statutory reasons. They also need to know how their business is doing so basically we take in all their information and we prepare their accounts for them so that they know how their business is doing and they can do things like tax as well.

What do you do on a typical day?

I generally get up about 7.30am and get into the office about 9am. Quite regular hours - 9 - 5.30 is standard. Basically you work with an accountancy package, doing a lot of the work on that so there will be different accountancy packages for different companies, doing a lot of work on excel, lots of spreadsheets and things like that. It's basically taking the information we are given and putting it into a neater more presentable format.

Describe the process of your work?

For example, we do some outsourcing work and outsourcing work is, instead of a company having their own accounts department, that we will basically do that form them, so we are like their accounts department. So they might come to us and say, we want you to do our management accounts, we want to know each month how much profit we've made. So what we would do is basically take all their invoices, look at their payroll, what they've been paying their staff and we basically take all that put it into a spreadsheet and we'd sort the figures out and try and match costs with the revenue that's coming in. Basically for every expense hopefully you have revenue coming in matching those off and basically you put this into a presentable format and give them the information as to what's going on with their company.

What are the speicialisms within your industry?

There are quite a few specialisms so you can either stick to audit or end up doing tax. There are further qualifications you can do if you really want to get into tax, or you can stick as a generalist and stick to your accounts prep. There are a few niche areas which are forensic accounting and forensic auditing which are kind of specialist. You could also maybe get into actuarial work and that's to do with pension funds and working out how much they are worth.

Why did you choose the ACA qualification?

I did work for a company and basically was going to start doing CIMA or ACCA training and it just appeared that basically all the managers were ACA trained and especially the higher up you got they were all ACA trained so it seemed to me that certainly in industry you needed to have the chartered accountancy qualification. It also appeared to be a bit more versatile where CIMA and ACCA would get you very specifically into industry, with the ACA you could either stay in practice or go into industry so it did seem a bit more versatile.

Is the ACA training different at small and large firms?

That's one of the things, it doesn't matter whether you're working for one of the big companies or smaller regional companies, and they send you off to the same college. Essentially there are two colleges that tend to do it, CAPLAN and BPP. They do the same training course, it's all handed down by the institute, the institute sets the course material; they set the exam so you're doing the same things. Whichever college you go to you're probably going to be sat next to people from the big four in exactly the same classroom so you're getting exactly the same training. I'm not sure there is very much difference between the two colleges but you should be aware there are these two main providers so if you're going into an interview you need to know the names of these two people and the company you are going to be working for will have a preference for one or the other.

What are the best bits about your job?

I think the best bit of the job is actually getting to know the clients so one of the benefits of working for a smaller company is that you're not just working for these large corporations, you're working for individuals or some of the larger companies only have 20 or 30 members of staff so you can really develop a bit of a relationship with them and some of the clients we work very closely with so it's almost like you're working for them.

What are the worst bits about your job?

There can be times when it's a bit mundane, so there's day to day things but one of the things that got me into accountancy was doing other office jobs and finding you're doing the same thing every month and one of the benefits of working for a smaller practice is you do lots of different jobs so it's quite good from that point of view, turning it around into a positive.

What has been your greatest achievement?

I think qualification is quite a big thing, so that's quite difficult to achieve. I got first time passes through all the exams so that was quite good.

Any regrets?

I'm not sure that I would. I kind of looked at working for one of the larger companies, one of the big four but to be honest it seemed a high pressure environment and they all seemed to be based in London so I didn't want to get into the 2 hours commuting a day.

What is the pay like and are there any perks?

I think you might not earn as much as the big four, maybe a few grand less but I think you are probably working shorter hours so pro rata is probably about the same. I suppose if you're working for a big company you're working overtime and getting paid for that instead. I think in a smaller company you're not going to see the same level of perks. We get a couple of trips a year which is very nice, gets us all together but in terms of company cars, things like that, you're not going to see anything like that.

How long is a working day and do you have to work out of hours?

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

Is there much in the way of travel?

We go out to see audit clients so certain larger companies need us to go and do a check of their company records for statutory reasons so we quite often go out and visit the clients for that so a lot of our clients are locally based so it's not masses of travel and no overnight stays.

Do you have to be based anywhere in particular?

You can work anywhere you want because there are lots of different sizes of company and they are all over the place so if you kind of work for one of the big companies they are mostly in London but they also have regional offices in Reading, places like that. The smaller company you work for the more diverse it gets so certainly for a smaller practice it could be literally anywhere, any town will have a whole range of different companies.

Do you spend a lot of time on site at clients?

For smaller firms we tend to do a lot more work in the office and I think that's basically to do with the clients that we have so the bigger firms will have much larger companies that they work for so they will generally require audit whereas the smaller companies a lot of their companies that they work for will not require audit so you spend a lot more time in the office doing account preparation and a lot less time actually out at the clients.

What is the working environment like?

It's quite formal working here, maybe slightly more than one of the larger companies where they might not expect you to wear a tie in the office but here you are expected to wear a suit and tie. It's quite a wide range of demographic, obviously we've got the partners who are the people own the firm and who are older and more experienced but apart from that because we bring in graduates and school leavers to start doing the training for accountancy qualifications that mean we have quite a lot of younger people here so out of about 20 people at the firm I'd say ten of us are not into our 30's yet.

How did you get into your job?

Basically there are two ways you can get into it, either you can do a degree and go on to do ACA training which is chartered accountancy qualification and basically you can get a good degree from a reasonable university to go on and do that or if you are a school leaver if you do your A-levels you can go and do something called AAT which is accounting technician training which is like a stepping stone onto the ACA. If you did the accounting technician course then you can probably go onto the ACA at a later stage so you kind of miss out some of the initial stages so it gets you through the first year as it were.

What's the application process like?

It varies; I don't think there are many agencies who would get you a job in practice so through the larger firms you would probably apply through their websites but for smaller firms they probably look locally, they probably put an advert in the paper. I looked up online to find out who the chartered accountants were and sent off my CV and that's how I got my job. It was a case of just coming in for an interview, quite an informal chat and standard interview questions.

What are the key skills required for your job?

I think to do this job you have to have an eye for detail. I know it's working with numbers but its not maths, you've got calculators. You don't have to be brilliant at maths but you do have to be happy with figures and it's more about accuracy than speed but at times you do have to be accurate and quick. As well as being accurate you probably have to be quite quick at working with numbers. It's quite an analytical job so particular for audits you're looking at trends, looking for figures and seeing patterns develop there. You do need to get on quite well with people because obviously when you go out to see clients it's quite important that you are the face of the firm, you need to be quite confident getting on with them.

What's your top tip for breaking into your industry?

I would think just get a bit of experience, show that you're interested in getting into accountancy so before I started the ACA training I did a few temp jobs working for accountancy departments for industry firms, so a pharmaceutical company, a large company called Centrica so they own British Gas and the AA and basically that kind of gave me relevant experience and showed that was there area I wanted to get into.

What's the career progress and how quickly can you move up the career ladder?

In terms of career progression you probably come in as a junior and need to start doing your training. You progress through your career as you complete your training so as you get half-way through your training you get part qualified and probably hope to become more of a managerial role. I think in a smaller firm it is probably just as easy to work up through the initial stages because it is matched to the training you do so your salary will increase as you go through your training and your role will increase as you go through your training but then obviously you might hit a glass roof when it comes to trying to get into a partnership role so maybe after that people in smaller firms move into other jobs in industry to get up the career ladder.

How does the role change over time?

Over time you get more responsibility, you seem to work on the more tricky jobs because obviously as your experience has increased you tend to work on things that need your level of experience and you tend to move away from doing the work to reviewing it.

Where do you see the industry going?

It's quite a stable industry so there are not a lot of changes going on and for the smaller companies we need to keep up with what's going on so changes and regulations are always happening but that's just something you have to keep up to date with.

Is there scope for movement during or after this career?

One of the things that attracted me to doing the chartered accountancy is that it did seem so versatile so I worked for a company and it seemed all the managers there were ACA qualified so even though they were training up their staff in other qualifications I thought maybe this was the thing to do so once you've qualified you can do anything. You can either work for one of the larger companies or stay in a smaller practice; you can go to the dark side of Inland Revenue or you could go into industry, quite a few people do that so working for a company in their accounts department.

What are the industry resources that someone interested in joining must know about?

For graduates to read industry resources probably one of them would be the Institute website, the ICAEW so that gives you quite a lot of information on what being a chartered accountant is how to get into it, what all the different firms do so that's quite a good thing. In terms of the magazines I read there's a magazine called Accountancy which keeps you up to date on all the things and that's again issued by the Institute but just reading the FT, things like that to keep abreast of what's going on.

Why did you choose to work at a small firm?

I think smaller firms offer better working hours, you tend to work for less hours, the pay might not be quite as much but you get perks, like not taking 2 hours a day to get to work. It's probably less high pressure so I think the bigger firms work to tighter deadlines. Everything works to a deadline here but because of the way the industry works you tend to have quite long deadlines and it's usually the client's responsibility to make sure you get the stuff on time so you're probably not working to deadlines quite as much.

If you weren't in this career, what would you be doing?

If I didn't pick this career I don't know what I would have done, probably a racing driver, something like that!