If you are going to be a successful big 4 accountant you need to know what they do. Whether you are just interviewing for a job now or you are already a big 4 accountant. It is good to know what a big 4 accountant does.

I know some of you might be saying that I know they do. They are in audit, tax or consulting. Yes that is the practice of the big 4 that they are in but what do they actually do. Then you might say well they audit financial statements or prepare tax returns. But they don’t audit financial statements or prepare tax returns all day everyday. There is more to their jobs than just that.

 

If you just sit there and try to think about what a big 4 accountant does, you can come up with a million different things that a big 4 accountant does.

Especially when you start going into specialties like mergers and acquisitions and deal advisory or transaction advisory services.

When I think about the big 4 accounting firms, I think of the type of people that I’ve encountered in the big and how I’d categorize those people.

 

I’d put big 4 accountants into 3 main categories

  • The Sales Person
  •  the Admin Expert
  • and the Technical Person.

The sales person is an expert at getting projects. They either have a ton of clients and those clients always have issues or they are good at entertaining clients. They take the clients to football games, soccer games, concerts, dinners or lunches.

I’d put big 4 accountants into 3 main categories

  • The Sales Person
  •  the Admin Expert
  • and the Technical Person.

The sales person is an expert at getting projects. They either have a ton of clients and those clients always have issues or they are good at entertaining clients. They take the clients to football games, soccer games, concerts, dinners or lunches.

The technical person is good at writing articles and good at the technical part of the big 4 job. They do research and they know all the latest accounting or tax guidance. These people are usually involved in the national offices of the big 4.

Lastly, there is a person that isn’t good at either of those or just doesn’t like them. This is a person that is an admin expert. By admin I mean the administrative side of the big 4. They are good at billing, setting up engagements, budgeting, risk management. There is a place for these people too.

Since I’ve explained the 3 types of people that work in the big 4, we can now go into what the big 4 job entails, right.

It boils down to:

  • Selling or (revenue generation) – working in the big 4 means that you are a profit center. This means you have to make your firm money.
  • Administrative tasks – this is all the things you have to do that do not make your firm money.
  • Technical Know-how – this is the fuel for the revenue generating engine. Clients won’t hire you if you don’t know that you are doing.

Most people think that working in the big 4 is all about technical know-how, but it is not. You have to know so much more.

Let’s explore each of the big 4 a little further now that we know the broad categories.

Selling at the big 4 accounting firms

First let’s go into selling. As I said before, as an accountant at the big 4 you have to be able to generate the firm revenue. That is what the seller does. They sell the big 4’s products. How do they do this. Well you can drill down into the components of how they sell to learn more about the selling side of the big 4.

At the big 4, I’ve broken down selling into 3 categories – I’m sure there are more – those categories are meeting with clients, promoting products, and closing the sale.  Meeting with clients is a broad category but you can break that down too. The tasks that the salesperson does here is attending conferences, going to the client site to meet with clients and taking the clients to meals or sporting activities.

As far as promoting products, the sales person does this by taking specialists to the client and showcasing the latest service offering. They also use social media.

Next let’s go over admin. Most people don’t even know the extent of all the administrative tasks that they will have to complete in the big 4. Like i said before there are some people that are experts in it.

There are so many categories of administrative task, but I tried to categorize it to 4 main areas.

Those areas are

  • billing,
  • project management,
  •  team building
  • and managing risk.

Admin people usually gain a lot of popularity if they are good at billing. Billing means that they are good at pulling WIPs which stands for work in progress. All this is is a report of the time detail of everyone who has ever charged time to that client code. That person is also good at analyzing that time coming up with an invoice and following up with the client to get that invoice paid. Since this is how the firm gets paid, if people enjoy this area they can still have a very successful career.

Some of the admin tasks that you will have to complete as a big 4 professional are

  • Resource management
  • Training
  • Internal meetings
  • Team building

This includes things like goal setting, performance feedback, training

There is also compliance with risk management which means maintaining your audit database or in the case of tax engagements it means loading documents into the document management system

Lastly is the technical area of accounting. This is how most people view big 4 accounting. Again I drilled down on this area of the big 4 as well and tried to break it down into categories. There is the regulatory knowledge, systems knowledge and technology changes. In order to be viewed as technical you have to specialize in one of those areas. For example regulatory knowledge. This means you have to stay abreast of regulatory changes like new pronouncements from the FASB or IASB. In the case of taxes, you would have to know the latest regulations and how they affect your client. If you wanted to seem really technical, you’d get involved in writing publications for your firm. Within each practice and even in each industry are further specialties.For example in audit and tax there are specialties in mergers and acquisitions. Those people don’t do any work other than work on mergers and acquisitions. Additionally, even though you might be technical, you have to apply that knowledge through systems. In auditing this means learning how to prepare workpapers using templates and uploading those to the audit database. You also have to learn various ERP systems like Hyperion, oracle and peoplesoft. Additionally, there are technological changes that change industries like tax and accounting. In order to seem technical you need to have knowledge of these as well. These are things like robotics, blockchain, automation and machine learning. Essentially, technical knowledge is the products that the big 4 are selling. What type of product will you be selling to your clients? Accounting advice or a new software tool that will automate their journal entries.

In order to succeed in the big 4 accounting firms, you need to know at least a little of each of these categories. The people that I’ve seen have the most success really focus on one single area though.