Much ink has been spilled, and electrons zapped, discussing the merits of working at a Big Four firm versus smaller firms. To get started, check out a post by the esteemed Steve McIntyre-Smith who writes about the upsides of working in a smaller firm . To brutally paraphrase his argument, if you want to be an accountant who helps small and mid-sized businesses with their numbers, it's the way to go to get experience doing the nitty gritty technical experience that they'll find indispensable. His post is aimed not at students, though, but rather at CAs who are looking to sell themselves to smart students looking for work. As a result, he of course doesn't spend much time on the Big Four side's arguments, because to those with experience they're well known. For the sake of my many readers who are still in school or about to start their first big time jobs, in a nutshell the upside to the Big Four side boils down to the fact that you deal with Big Audits, and the associated...
Now here's an interesting accounting-world related question - don't roll your eyes at the sight of "accounting-world" and "interesting" in the same sentence - if you were to almost reduce the sales-side of the equation and focus only on the cost of delivering audits, with a small profit margin to keep things running smoothly, could you deliver quality audits? Of course, it happens all the time with smaller firms that have lower overhead - which is why sole proprietor CAs can serve many small clients and charge lower fees to scoop up business from entrepreneurs. I wonder, though , if this approach is applicable to big firms too ? I haven't given this too much detailed though but the big thinkers are all over this all the time it seems . Something that definitely deserves some more attention and information. Like knowing what proportion of revenue is used to cover sales and administrative costs, for example It'd be interesting to see what would happen...