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I'm an accounting major here in Texas and I'll be getting into the internal accounting side (MIS stuff). I've been going through recruitment and interviewing but I'm still not exactly sure what the jobs are. Can anyone here fill me in on what they do if they're involved in the field? Also, opinions on the big 4 firms are appreciated. I interviewed with all 4 and should get into the next step of recruitment for all of them, but right now they all seem pretty great.
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Mar 29, 2012 00:19
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Thanks, I'll be interning in Dallas but I'll be open to moving anywhere once I get out of school. All of the internships I've interviewed for have been for more of the Risk Assurance/ITRA stuff like you've mentioned, but I'm also interested in Security as well. I'm on track to intern for this next fall semester and then go back for my MIS Master's and finishing up the acct bachelors. The controls testing is what I've been telling people so far, I just say that auditors check the financial statements while I'll be checking out the system generating the statements. I just don't know if I'm signing up for a few years of sifting through excel files daily to find errors or if the work is a bit more engaging.
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Mar 29, 2012 03:10
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My intermediate really wasn't that bad, the main problem I had was when my prof flew through the hardest and longest chapters at the end of the course because we went too slowly early on in the semester. A bunch of it was rehashed 229(financial) and a few new concepts. It took more work than financial and managerial, but getting an A wasnt that hard.
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Mar 30, 2012 17:42
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So I'm recruiting with all the Big 4 and have to choose which one I like best. Anybody have horror stories/advice? Please don't say its just about the people.
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Apr 14, 2012 08:04
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From what I've heard during my recruitment process, Big 4 busy season is crazy (less so for MIS/Internal Audit/RAS/ITRA) which is awesome during the internship due to overtime hours, but not when you get in and get paid salary for the same amount of work. Some people love it and stay in until manager/director/partner, some people jump out after 2-5 years to take a better middle market job with a better work/life balance. I've also heard that acct busy seasons are nothing compared to law and Investment banking seasons, which chew people up in 5 years max.
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Apr 22, 2012 03:55
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I'm in an Accounting/MIS grad program and starting full time with a Big 4 in 2014. Does anyone have a good resource site for Excel knowledge? I have the basics down and have taken/will take macro/VBA classes, but I tend to forget the details when I don't use excel on a daily basis and I'd like to have somewhere online to periodically refresh my knowledge. The semester long internship with my firm didn't require too much advanced knowledge of excel, but it's better to be able to poo poo out a file with too many details and formulas and all that than having to always guess-and-check work requiring more than simple formulas and graphs.
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Jun 17, 2013 22:07
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Thanks guys  Excel does seem to be a thing where the only way to learn it is to mess around with it, screw it up, and find out how to fix it so you don't do it again. The main problem is dealing with dumb client files and things not importing in the correct format. And that time I spent multiple hours trying to complete a controls test with a VLOOKUP that wouldn't work half the time. I'm pretty sure being a master at all things VLOOKUP would get me a raise after my first year.
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Jun 19, 2013 23:31
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Pittsburgh Lambic posted:I try. My current retail job is lovely, but at least interesting; I sell stuff for making homebrewed beer and know all about homebrewing, and can talk at length about it; it always goes over well. I just don't have much to say during the interview. I always get the impression that the interviewer wants a friend, not an employee, and that catches me off guard. I guess that's par for the course and I should prepare for that to be the case, wherever I go? If you passed the CPA on your first try, you have the starting technical skillset for Big 4/other CPA firms (I'm assuming, I only know Big 4 right now). Interviewers are looking for people with those skillsets who aren't too weird/boring to work with for 40+ hours a week for months on end. In an interview, you'll want to show you'll be a great employee AND you can work with a team without making them hate you before the engagement is over. You don't necessarily have to be best friends with your team members, but being able to talk about a variety of subjects outside of work stuff is appreciated. Good first impressions on everyone at the interview is also crucial. If you meet a few associates before you go in to interview and blow them off, on purpose or on accident, you're already screwed.
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Jul 13, 2013 06:12
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Mush Mushi posted:I am on my way to a certain team-buildin, flash mobin, disney world celebration right now. This may be a long shot but are any of you goons going to be there? Hopefully you weren't the dude who puked on a Partner's shoes and ran off, but if your flight was on Sunday I'm assuming you're San Fran/San Jose office? Those San Jose kids asked a lot of questions.
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Aug 17, 2013 02:42
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Mush Mushi posted:Haha! I knew there had to be someone. Yeah I am in the Bay Area. Did you witness that puking incident? Nice, I had three SF people on my team that were all pretty cool. I didn't see anything too crazy since I never made it past the bar at the hotel and out to downtown or the boardwalk. I accepted my offer last december (Risk Assurance internship last fall semester) so I got all my partying out of the way already, plus I spent last weekend drinking heavily to make up for not going too hard in Orlando. It was funny talking to the partners about partying though. All one of them wanted to do was grab a case of beer, go sit on the pier, and split it with his team. He was pretty mad that "the one or two idiots" every year kept ruining his ability to do that.
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Aug 17, 2013 22:53
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My internship was last fall semester and I made bank. Worked at max 60 hour weeks and got overtime pretty much every day. Worked through the Risk Assurance busy season so I feel like I actually got some solid experience, even if my feedback was less harsh than the associates working there full time. My girlfriend and other friends in auditing worked during the audit busy season this spring and got worked to the bone. Summer interns do get super pampered, but I wouldn't be hesitant to hire an associate from Big 4 just because they didn't stick around to make senior. Busy season isn't for everyone.
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Aug 18, 2013 21:08
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Try your best to get an internship in public accounting, and look for jobs before you take the CPA. You have some leeway there, but afaik being eligible to take the exam and having a master's is enough to get hired (as long as you actually take it when you start working.) If you get a good internship and turn that into a full time offer with the same/similar firm you could ask to start working in August/September which gives you a few months off to relax/study for the CPA/what have you. What are your grades in accounting classes? A sub 3.0 GPA isn't ideal, but if you can get it up to 3.3 and show you've been acing your accounting classes then it doesn't look as bad. I know most Big 4 firms at my school weigh the intermediate accounting class grade pretty heavily.
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Sep 9, 2013 22:40
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http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3547149&pagenumber=5 Go post in there [you may have - I didn't check] and see if any problems pop up with your pitch. CPA is good, but if you go with Big 4 I can see them being hesitant about your age. You've been out of college since 05, which means you'd be a first year associate working under Seniors and Managers younger than you which has some potential for awkwardness.
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Sep 18, 2013 06:04
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Good Citizen posted:On campus interviews are next week and I've got interviews lined up with both EY and KPMG. No call back from Deloitte or PwC sadly. I'm so stressed out about it at the moment because I was really hoping to get my foot in the door at all 4. I talked to other people in my grad program and most of them didn't get interview offers from any of them or only got one. It seems the interview slots were really limited this year. Only one guy I know got all 4. Thankfully I'm pretty good at interviewing but I seriously just can not wait for it to be over. Good luck, if you got an interview your technical skills/credentials should check out. The actual interview should be to see if you are a fit for their teams or not , or maybe shoring up any areas of concern in your resume.
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Sep 29, 2013 01:48
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When I was recruiting I had the worst habit of saying something to fill silences at dinner tables. Leading to me telling a partner it was going to be a bummer to shave every day because it irritates my face  .Still got an offer. Probably shouldn't have.
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Oct 3, 2013 00:44
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I took my first accounting class and really liked how everything balanced out when done right. Then I realized my school does a 5 year masters program where I can get a bachelor in accounting, master in whatever focus I choose, and take the CPA before I start working. That, plus the 99% job placement rate for my program, convinced me to get into it. It's basically become a Big 4 farm but I can't complain about a solid starting job and a semester long internship where I made oodles of cash from overtime.
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Oct 6, 2013 03:38
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What all were you doing in the summer for auditing that made you work so much? From what I hear, the summer is for relaxing and maybe doing a few things to prepare databases for the next busy season and doing fun intern events. Then former interns come in expecting that level of work and get slammed with the reality of busy season. Then again, my internship was auditing ITGCs and such in the risk assurance umbrella, so I got that impression from talking to actual audit interns and staff.
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Dec 5, 2013 00:39
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Sent in the packet of requirements to apply for the CPA Exam today. Here's to studying my life away for the next 4-5 months.
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Dec 21, 2013 09:26
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Mandalay posted:That's a pretty aggressive timeline. Good luck. Thanks. This last semester of my accounting program is centered around passing the exam, so I only have two very simple classes to worry about and plenty of time to study each day. Plus the Big 4 comped the Becker course so I have all their study materials to go off of.
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Dec 22, 2013 21:22
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I'm pretty sure Becker got in real close with my accounting program once they realized it's an automatic ~200 kids taking the exam every year they can snatch up. Since the program has become a Big 4 farm, everyone gets the course comped. It works out since the program keeps a fairly high pass rate, everyone can study together easily, Becker gets automatic POs for their course, and the firms get CPAs.
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Dec 31, 2013 08:20
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gently caress me there are a lot of flashcards.
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Jan 6, 2014 23:48
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Scheduled FAR on February 7th. 3-4 more Becker modules to go through before I take the test.
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Jan 24, 2014 16:19
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It's a voucher right? Wouldn't you just treat it like a discount and go: DR: Cash $500 CR: Revenue $465 CR: Training Allowance $35 Recorded at net so nothing difference unless it goes unused. Or just record at gross and then debit a contra-revenue account for training sessions taken.
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Jan 28, 2014 07:21
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Governmental accounting sucks and I hate it.
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Feb 2, 2014 19:37
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Took FAR today. Wasn't too stressed since it's basically my third time taking it this week with the Becker practice tests. Banking on those and the hundreds of practice questions I did to get the passing grade. Oh my god my buddy lives across the street from a specs and all the bars in Houston this is glorious. Democratic Pirate fucked around with this message at 23:17 on Feb 7, 2014 |
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Feb 7, 2014 22:10
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ThirdPartyView posted:Is FAR your last part? Nope, first. But it's my birthday this weekend so I'm taking the next two nights to get drunk before ramping up for taking BEC on the 27th.
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Feb 7, 2014 23:55
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That sounds about right for an intern - they aren't going to do everything perfectly even if it's "copy and paste the py workpapers into the new database"
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Feb 18, 2014 23:19
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FAR results are scheduled to come in tomorrow, oh boy.Bloody Queef posted:Worthless as in both most mind-numbing job in the world AND the feeling of what you're doing literally has no worth. None of my audit friends have found any material differences in the financial statements of the companies we audit. I have, however, found several in tax provision review. On my risk assurance internship, the first question of the first client interview I did resulted in an exception. Not material, but it was exciting. I had a  moment when I realized another busy season had come and gone and other associates/interns had leveraged my py workpapers. At the time I thought I was doing a good job, but I'm sure they looked at my work and thought "what on earth was this clown doing."
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Feb 25, 2014 05:47
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Bloody Queef posted:How'd you do? I got a 72 on BEC, my first exam. Pretty upset, but then I looked at my study log and I logged a solid 8 hours, so probably need to actually study for this. Edit - Score came in, got a 90
Democratic Pirate fucked around with this message at 15:41 on Feb 26, 2014 |
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Feb 26, 2014 05:02
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Moneyball posted:For those of you doing the Becker program, what is your process? Watch each lecture once, take notes, and then drill multiple choice/simulation? Do you keep going with old MC questions while working on the new ones for each lecture? How often do you go through the book? I mostly concentrated on the MC questions for FAR and only consulted the book when I was completely stumped; now that I'm onto tests with more theory and tax laws I'm going back over the book more often to get the theory in my head. Overall, I generally try to get the MC questions to 100%, do the simulations, do all the MC to 100% a second time, then go back over them all for review at the end after taking the first final review test and before taking the second one. On the last big run through it's okay to skip questions if they're all repetitive with similar numbers and you're rushed for time. The main problem I've had with MC is memorizing the answers after the second run through. You have a longer timespan to work sections than I did, so you could probably throw in some progress tests as well. They're just randomized questions from the selected test sections, but they're a good way to get used to switching around between question topics instead of only focusing at one topic of one section at a time.
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Mar 7, 2014 01:47
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My public accounting starting is low 50's and it gets up to ~57 for my friends heading to NYC to offset cost of living changes. Granted I'll have a masters, CPA and bachelors, but I am under the impression that all big 4 first years get about the same.
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Mar 8, 2014 16:31
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Harry posted:4 1/2 weeks should be plenty. I would study government more than you think (this is a huge part of the exam, and it really didn't come off that way with the course I used) and be good at journal entries. Yep. I started FAR on Jan 6th and took the test on Feb 7th and did fine with 2 sections a week + F10 split up randomly. Government was the most stressful part because it was the last stuff I went over and I'd never learned it in classes, so I would've liked more time to review it. I ended up doing fine on the test though.
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Mar 20, 2014 16:14
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Take extra time to double-check anything you are turning in for review for spelling errors and professionalism. It makes life easier for everyone.
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Mar 30, 2014 22:21
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I can't imagine taking the CPA while working full time. I know people do it, but man that must suck. Take the time to get it done with no other distractions and then hopefully take a vacation or do nothing for a few weeks to recharge and get ready to start working. If you already have the option through HR you're good to go, plus you'll come in being able to bill CPA hours from the get go.
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Apr 3, 2014 16:25
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Reg is the worst thing. Ever.
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Apr 4, 2014 21:08
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abagofcheetos posted:It is kind of daunting, because I can easily conceive there being a permutation of the exam where I could literally get a zero. There is just so much stuff to learn... I just took it. I probably failed, maybe didn't, 100% don't care because I'm on my way to a muddy field to drink beer with thousands of other college kids for 2 days straight.
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Apr 4, 2014 22:31
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It was a mix of things. I didn't feel too bad about the multiple choice, but there were parts of the simulations that I had never seen and struggled with. In general I didn't have as good a grasp on distributions/gross estate stuff as I would've liked.
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Apr 5, 2014 00:34
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Doubled salary sounds great but I always thought ibanking was one of the industries with a higher burnout rate than Big4 busy seasons.
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Apr 24, 2014 18:57
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I'm currently sitting in the test center lobby waiting for my car pool buddy after taking AUD. I feel good about it, so my main concern is finding out my REG score on May 5-6. There's nothing to do now but wait, so it's time to play the game I like to call "how much whiskey and Netflix can one man consume in a day?"
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Apr 27, 2014 16:49
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 15:57 |
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ThirdPartyView posted:ETA until liver failure? My roommates and I are on a Scrubs kick, so I'm going to drink until season 9 seems funny. I'll need a permanent IV and lots more whiskey.
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Apr 28, 2014 04:07
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