In external audit you will also cover operational audit, but merely brush through.

In operational audit or what is generally known as internal audit, you will be check the selected operation's internal control. The process generally starts by documenting how the overall process / system like sales process, requesting for budget etc works and who are the process owners, and what documentations are in place.

That might sound sophisticated, but sometimes it is generally a no-brainer work of checking whether documents has been signed or whether a specific P&P has been documented and followed. You will be asked to provide points of improvement for the operations under audit and point out internal control deficiencies. But most of the time, your client or process owners of the operations will laugh at your suggestion because their years of experience will tell you that your suggestion is not feasible (because most of the time we will be providing solutions like 'get an extra person to check through another person's work / create this new document to track the process and get someone signed it as a prove of control in place) Sometimes, you just wonder if you are actually in a good position to challenge them at all with you lack of real experience.

Generally, that is my thought. The plus side however is that your will build up your people skill and communication skills because you need to persuade process owners to buy your idea / outsmart them with your eloquence. Sometimes, certain issues are bigger than just merely lack of documentation and what not, it is a overall management culture which operational audit will be hard to point out. (that you need advisory people to point out, usually ppl from the BCG or Mckinsey).

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Added on November 12, 2011, 12:46 amThat really depends which part of the CF you are talking about. Assuming your CF also include the due diligence team, your audit experience will be helpful. the only thing that is different is that you will need exercise more commercial judgement on top of your skills to verify certain numbers / vouching documents.

If you are talking about financial modeling, your knowledge about financial statements and double entries your learn from audit is useful because you will need to construct a pro-forma financial statement based on client's forecast. That is the basic. However, more skills are required in learning to build a more efficient model (more advanced excel skillls). In more advanced valuation jobs, knowledge of finance concepts such as CAPM, terminal value or to a certain extent, binomial / black scholes model (if you are dealing options or share option payment schemes) are more useful which, audit experience may not be directly relevant at all.

In restructuring where you will be doing a a lot of receivership / liquidation job, your audit knowledge may be relevant if you are familiar with Companies' Act. Since you will be asking for a lot of company documentations in a restructuring work, your audit experience should able to tell you what sort of documents a typical company has and where to locate them, it makes your job more efficient. However, audit experience is not really a prerequisite in many instance.

Your audit experience will also be useful if you are dealing with company reorganisation where a good understanding of consolidation / merger accounting, inter company balances settlement and taxation effects (if you learned it in audit at all) will be most helpful. In debt restructuring schemes, your accounting knowledge will also help you to identify the assets available to pay debts (but not as extensive as audit requires)

If you are in the M&A or Infrastructure finance advisory, i think audit experience may not so much relevant. Basic finance concepts such as PE multiples, EV/EBITDA, cash flow forecasts and projection knowledge, capital market regulation, knowledge on economics and together with good research skills will be more relevant. This line generally requires more creative and commercial oriented thinking because jobs are usually highly unstructured which i think consulting experience are more helpful. This is the line where a broad based knowledge will be helpful. Off course, basic accounting knowledge will definitely be a good bonus.

In short, it really depends what you have learned during the audit and how you could best relate your experience to your potential jobs in CF. Generally, ppl with strong audit background are very well suited for due diligence work and many times audit guys are seconded to support due diligence jobs.



This post has been edited by Justin Wong: Nov 12 2011, 12:46 AM

I am in the CF / Transactions / Corporate Advisory Department of one of the Big 4s, Considering my 5 years of working experience in both Advisory and Transactions, let me share some of my thoughts about corporate restructuring and see if you might be inspired in some ways.

There are generally 2 types of corporate restructuring: the one where the company is facing distress situation and the management / shareholders wish to initiate a voluntary / involuntary arrangement with the creditors / lending banks to come up with a scheme of arrangements. In this exercise, an accounting firm will be engaged to conduct an assessment to identify the break-down value of the assets in the company and from there, derive a scheme of payment to respective creditors / banks based on their priority of claims. Tough negotiations and hostility may ensue.

The second corporate restructuring is where a healthy group of companies intends to reorganize its group structure to achieve certain strategic intent (i.e., spin-off, prepare for IPO, tax efficiency) where the accounting firm is being engaged to provide them with different options available highlighting the respective pros and cons of the options. depending on the complexity of the group exercises, knowledge of consolidation accounting and tax knowledge is essential, as well as some aspect of the Companies Act. In this regard, auditing experience may seemed helpful but I doubt anyone with less than 3 years audit experience will have such level of exposure to provide any value to such exercise. Besides, I have manage to come by without one anyways.

Unlike in audit, corporate advisory job of such nature are usually unstructured and different deliverables may be requested by the client on an ad hoc basis. In one of the job I was involved in, the client also requested a valuation and business modeling services and we ended up conducting market approach valuation and DCF valuations for them as well. In another case, while I was preparing the financial statement implication analysis for the client, I was obliged to explain and highlight the relevant sections of the equity guidelines and Capital Market Service Act (which was not my area of expertise) because the client wish to conduct a reverse-takeover as part of a corporate restructuring. I presume this will turn into the sort of financial advisory services which you highlighted in your queries above?

In short, you must be comfortable or very much excited with these kind of ad hoc encounters. Your seniors / managers may not be able to provide the most timely guidance to you because they may be forced to learn on their own as well when new situation arises and you are expected to contribute, rather than just learn only. In short, it involve steep learning curve but it is a different ball game altogether as compared to audit. Strong people skills will be helpful as you are expected to consult a lot of technical experts (i.e., tax / audit, lawyers) to deliver your job. Nobody knows everything, it is a concerted effort.

Cheers. Hope that gives you a flavor of things?

To be fair, audit experience will be well-received but not crucial, according to some of the people I talked to, there are a number of instances where ordinary auditors are ill-suited for our line of job because they are too comfortable following structured steps (audit methodologies and steps in that regard) and fail to demonstrate the ability to improvise depending on situation. However, this is just some of the general observations and we do have auditors who joined us and performed very well in fact. However, auditors are well-suited for due diligence work due to the similarity (to answer the question if audit experience is required, it is a 'Yes' if you are planning to join the due diligence services, 'No' for the rest of the service lines but it can be a rather selective process, judging from the backgrounds of the candidate we hired so far)

Technical skills wise, in addition to what I have mentioned and what you have repeated, I also wish to emphasize that sometimes it is not about mastery of individual technical areas (accounting, finance, law), but more of showing the ability to integrate and consider the various technical aspect in a transaction. I personally do not think we expect too much from a freshie in terms of technical skills. Instead, we emphasize more of the soft skills such as confidence in presenting point of view and independent thinking. Then again, people with these kind of qualities are generally academic high performers as well though we have seen exceptions.

We will definitely provide our junior colleagues objectives, briefing in executing a job, but you can pretty much forget about organising a schedule because client always change their minds and move their deadlines (earlier sometimes).

For the benefit of the earlier question, I think the pay offered in CF department is generally the same like those in the audit department, though there is a possibility that some firms may be higher. I am not too sure about the rest but I am pretty confident the difference is merely marginal compared to auditor's pay. CFA is not a must but it is sponsored. Based on my personal experience, you will find your CFA studies much more applicable if you are doing valuations, instead of business restructuring (where accounting is much more applicable).

I do not think applying again will help your case, you may wish to call the HR to follow-up on your application and seek confirmation. If they are really interested to employ you, they will ask if you are willing to accept junior associate position instead. In the event of your failure to secure a position with them, you should proceed to apply in other firms instead of re-applying because the chances are they will not entertain you. The same goes to all other Big 4s and this is my personal opinion.

In terms of hours, I would say the hours are definitely better than audit.

Hi there, let me try.

So as you know, there are audit, tax, consulting and for some firms, the CF/transaction practice.

Generally, the culture in all audit division of big4s are about the same, but so far the general consensus is that EY has the best people culture. Full disclosure: I was from EY.

PwC, at least in Malaysia, generally exhumes elitism. Ppl who got accepted into PwC are generally of very high quality and hence, they are a bit snobbish. This is especially true if you are in the consulting division (mostly top notch foreign graduates). Full disclosure: I worked in PwC as well for a short period of time.

That being said, PwC has a more structured approach in their audit work so freshies will be able to learn more effectively, In my own opinion, but this has nothing to do with culture I guess? the reason I am saying this is there are other considerations as well including culture.

I have no experience with KPMG and Deloitte, but.. most of my friends who worked in Deloitte audit have not been giving me good feedback so far. Then again, that was like.. 3 years ago.

Culture also differs between divisions. So not sure which division are you interested to know more? I have worked in audit, consulting and CF in one of the Big 4s so I can probably offer some biased opinion. I left about a year ago.. but funny enough joining the CF consulting practice in one of the Big 4s in Australia.

Hi there,

I chose to go Australia because I need to renew my PR. It is that simple. Of course, the money does not hurt and the market is more sophisticated as well, especially for the consulting side, which I think it will be good for my CV.

Generally what your friend told you is true - You only get to have non-peak periods if you are in the financial services audit, especially the insurance industry. That is because generally all of them have the same year end and hence there will be down times when the financial year end reporting and auditing is ended. If you are in other industry, the chances are you will be allocated to other companies audit of different year end as soon as you finished your previous engagement. I don't know about KPMG but I think PwC and EY have a dedicated audit team for the insurance industry so they do get non-peak periods. But I heard these days they might be allocated to help out in other teams too in order to maximise the utilisation. It is really hard work.

on the focus of specific areas, yes it is generally true - in order for you to learn in all the processes from end to end meaningfully, you need to stay at least for 5 years (rule of thumb, it may differ depending on your own initiative). I think the more relevant question is what do you intend to make out of your experience, namely, do you wanna work in a big corporate or do you wish to stay in the SME sector and start your own practice eventually? This is pertinent because in many ways, it is mutually exclusive: People who did SME audits will not be well-equipped to audit a large corporate and vice versa, and each has its required skill set. If you intend to be a financial controller or CFO in a large listed co, then Big 4 is almost a mandatory requirement, regardless of whether you know the process from end to end. But if you intend to start your own practice and audit SME clients, your Big 4 experience will be too narrow to equip you well (I have heard real cases about a PwC senior associate who struggled in an SME because he was so used to the structured steps and approach that is common in large corporate audit, and in the end, he left because he cannot perform in a SME environment). Question is, what do your career goal? It is a hard question I acknowledge but you need to think about it.

There is no good or bad. In my example, I made a deliberate choice to stay away from audit because I suck at it and I did badly during my internship in one of the Big 4s (I honestly thought my career was doomed then since I cannot do audit). I went to consulting and subsequent CF practice and to my surprise, I did fairly okay and got to the position of where I am today. The trouble is that, given the nature of consulting and the specialised skill set, I can never go back to my hometown to practice because there is just no market for it, and I really cannot start my own audit firm as well because I don't know how to do audit, which was my original intention when I started out. There are time, honestly, I hope I stay on with audit and gain enough SME experience so that I can go back to my hometown to start my own practice and live near to my family. So my point is, no right or wrong, just how can you make the best out of it.

Perhaps you can be more specific in your question so that I try my best to help u. I might not respond to you on time as I have been busy lately but I will sure reply you.

Hope that helps!

If you intend to be a Financial Controller or CFO of a multinational company, Audit is definitely the right choice. In many ways, Big 4 audit experience is almost perceived as the pre-requisite for financial controller of CFO roles in big organisations.

I have a lot of friends who spent about 5 years in audit and switch their career to consulting. You may wanna consider that as well if you wish to expand your career choice in the future. But to be a financial controller or CFO, audit experience is almost a must.. at least in this part of world (Asia that is). In US and in UK, you will notice it is not necessary so although it tend to be so as well.

Cheers

Hi there,

It is generally hard to define what is consulting, some say it is basically anything that is not audit and tax. Not sure if you heard of firms like Mckinsey, BCG and Bain? Take a read of their websites and perhaps it might help you in getting some idea.

Generally speaking and in my own definition, consulting involves providing strategic, operational or transactional solutions to the client's business. Example of strategic solutions includes a client that wish to enter a new market and they might engage consultants to study the new market and assess the company's strength or weaknesses in achieving that. McKinsey, BCG and Bain generally focuses in these category of services.

An example of operational solutions include a client has acquired a new business and they wish to integrate the new business process with their existing business process, so they may engage the consultants to project manage the integration process and create new policy and procedures for them in that regards. Compliance solutions can be part of operational solutions and in that case, auditors may be engaged to advise the client in complying with new accounting standards (IFRS 13 maybe?) and how they may configure their existing accounting system to enable them to generate or record the required accounting data, subject to independence conditions.

Implementation of strategic solutions provided by strategy consultants also falls under this category

There are a lot of boutique consulting firms that focuses in specific areas of operational solutions, but the bigger names will be Accenture and of course, the Big 4 consulting arms (Although they also provide strategic and transactional consulting).

Transactional solutions will include helping the client in mergers and acquisitions, valuing a business they wish to acquire, or help the client in restructuring their existing business for IPO. Investment Banks, CF houses and the Big 4s generally focuses in this area. M&A or restructuring tax planning may also fall under this category.

As additional point, audit and tax is different from consulting in that consulting is not subject to specific regulation under the law, unlike audit and tax, except for specific transactional consulting such as M&A and valuation.

Hope that helps?

I dunno which firm you are going to work for but I have a feeling it might be EY. Irrelevant anyways.

I do not know what you should expect specifically but I suspect you will be helping in some of the Programme Management Office (PMO) work. Essentially, it is a helping big clients to monitor their strategy / change implementation work by keeping track of meetings that needs to be conducted, follow up with process owners.. etc. It can be administrative but the upside is you will see how strategy work is being implemented at the ground level. As a junior, your role is to.. well, take minutes of meetings, call-up process owners or send them emails, and help drafting reports for periodical meetings. Keep an open mind about these menial work as it can be an avenue to see the process.

If you are lucky, you may get to help out in jobs that helps clients to develop strategic roadmap - i.e., helping clients to identify what they should be doing in 5 years time. As a junior, again, you are pretty much doing menial stuffs that includes helping to create presentation slides, conduct researches on the internet and at best, interviewing key stakeholders in the company to obtain their view. The senior member of the team usually are the ones who will provide the ideas for the presentation slides.

During downtimes, you will be requested to help out in drafting proposals - again, creating slides / presentation decks to sell services to potential clients. Again, as junior, you will take instructions from senior people in the team to amend the slides, conduct researches, and running around getting CVs from different people in the company. etc.

This is just a glimpse of the typical consulting work I have seen and it can be more than that.

Hope that helps, and please have fun with it!

Depends on which firm and which division. Generally speaking it is possible. During my time, there is an top-scoring ACCA fresh grad who got into Mckinsey. And I have a number of friends in consulting who started as ACCA fresh grad as well. I think if you manage to apply at the right time when they need people, and you manage to do well during the interview (which involves case study and presentation in some of the firms), yeah you should be able to get in. Timing is everything for those who are well-prepared.

Things might have changed now but I reckon that of all the Big 4s, getting into PwC's consulting / advisory division is the hardest because they are very selective, and in someways, they prefer foreign graduates who are top scorers. (Back then, I had acquitances who graduated from Oxford and he joined the PwC CF team for a while). Still, you can try.

Don't doubt yourself and just feel confident to try! However, try not to be be dissappointed if they reject you because it is competitive.

It is just part of life and you will get there eventually if you try hard enough. I was an ACCA grad btw

Question: do you want an international career or just local career?

At the moment, there is a strong demand for experienced internal auditors globally because of stronger emphasis in risk management and corporate governance, especially the banks. In addition, internal audit generally requires you to travel around so if you enjoy moving around, it pays well and you can to travel on the employer's expenses.Downside is that you will get tired with the travelling eventually and you might wanna settle down. It is currently in demand because there is a general shortage of ppl with the relevant industry experience. Things might change in the future.

Tax is great as well but because tax regulation differs from one country to another, international mobility is limited. However, specialised tax consultants are highly paid (much highly paid than internal auditors, and I am talking about specialised areas like M&A tax planning, legal entity rationalisation, and tax jurisdiction arbitrage like the those your heard bout the tax loopholes between UK and the US) and there are more chances for you to start out your own practice and be a freelance tax consultant. I can't say the same for internal auditor. It can be boring unless you enjoy tax technicalities and law.

Cool?

This post has been edited by Justin Wong: Mar 15 2015, 01:25 PM

I know what you are saying and I can't deny that might happen. If that happen to any aspiring interns however, my advice is you need to be aggressive and request for more responsibility.. and perform obviously.

Gone were the days (in general) interns are only expected to photocopy and do shits like that (though it is still common to sanitise documents, because junior and senior all do that regardless). Yes interns are less likely to get the chance to deal with clients directly that I agree. Bottom line, if partners or managers were known to allow interns to do only meaningless work, we will receive complain and it looks bad on us. As a Manager back then, I tried not to ask interns to do photocopies unless necessary (I do my own photocopies). All Big 4s wants to attract candidate and it is in their best interest to leave a good working experience to the interns.

No doubt it happens but it can be rectified.

This post has been edited by Justin Wong: Mar 15 2015, 02:21 PM

The Big 4s here are structured in such a way that resources are shared nationally - so currently I am based in Brisbane focusing on mining, O&G and infrastructure CF consulting but I might be relocated to Sydney or Melb or anywhere when there is a need for ppl and my skillsets

Yupp, I came back because I need to stay for 2 years in order to renew my next visa.

The good thing about accountants is that the skillsets are globally transferrable and you should be able to get similar role back in Malaysia, generally speaking. However, I need to know further about your current role and industry exposure to give you more relevant advice. Essentially, I think there is not much difference in terms of career progression especially if you are talking about commercial.

I am not sure where should I start - generally, accounting departments in SMEs or some big corporates in Malaysia are not well-organised. Topping this up with the fact that accountants are being perceived as cost centres, accountants tend to overwork and under-resourced, so if you factor in those distress and the per-hour equivalent pay, it is not really a high-paying profession. This is the current scenario in Malaysia as far as my experience is concerned.

If you are working for big internationoal companies like say.. I dunno, CIMB or Petronas or Shell's shared services centres, those will be much more better. The potential situation is really diverse so I can't pinpoint exactly.

So bottom line is, you can safely go back without too much concern about career progression (they need ppl here anyways), but you will realise your responsibilities may be higher and wider in Malaysia given the similar level of pay. You can always go back to Aus if you don't like it.

Hope that make sense?

This post has been edited by Justin Wong: Mar 16 2015, 12:04 PM

Yes I was, but now I with one of them in Aus.

My view is that your industry exposure in construction should serve you well in Malaysia as construction companies are always on the lookout for accountants with the relevant industry knowledge (There is a shortage apparently I dunno why). That is of course if you wanna join the commercial.

If you wish to join the professional service, I think internal audit will welcome candidates like you because of your industry knowledge and will probably offer you the highest senior associate position (Or manager, I dunno). I think you may join other areas of consulting too such as Performance Improvement team but I am not sure you will be able secure a more senior role, because consulting in general look for people who knows how to do presentation and write fluffy reports, which is a typical skill that conventional accountants lack of. Pushing it, you might get the role of an assistant manager (I dun think they have this title anymore, they change it to Senior 3) but it can be hard because at managerial level, you are required to demonstrate report writing skills and the the ability to lead a team. Then again, it is really a matter of impressing the interviewers.

You should start hooking up with headhunters to help you in this because they can be really effective in getting you the right role, I presume you already have Linkedin.

I guess I have been lucky in securing a job with Big 4 but if I may say so, Big 4 experience is generally globally recognised. Plus, getting a job is not really about your capabilities, it also depends on who you know, and how well you impress the interviewers at that time. Aussies love fluffs and if you can shamelessly sell yourself during the process, you are already half way there, I am sure you know about that too.

Cheers.

Hi there,

For question 1 & 2, I don't think I have an aswer esp for question 2, because it really depends on how you sell your story: If you had mediocre uni and high school results, but score a straight pass, you can argue that you realised what you want in life work hard for it, and you might impress the employer because they appreciate signs of being focused and determined, and your previous history may be disregarded, if you have not much competition of course. In addition, it also depends how you present yourself during the interview - Generally, employer are more impressed by people who can speak well and confident but with OK results (you seemed to fall into the ok category, I think), instead of people who are with great results but stutter or shy during the interview. There are many factors.

I believe you can easily get an answer for Q1 from someone, not critical in the long run.

For Q3, generally no. It is too short to be valued. It is helpful for you personally but generally it is unlikely to be recognised. Coz it just does not stand out. I will tell you what stands you out - Volunteering as a social worker in Bangladesh for WHO or Worldbank (not relevant to your job but branding wise, stands out, still won't get you fast track to higher role, but helps in getting the job)

Q4: For freshies defintely yes unless you graduate from a very reputatble uni despite your second lower. Again, depends on what kind of story you can spin (e.g., I was rebellious when I was young but I know my mistake by compensating it with straight passes in ACCA, I was bz doing part time to... whatever) YOU MUST HAVE A VALID STORY.

Q5: I have never studied in Aus, I am a local college grad and yeah I managed to secure a job in Aus. So it is possible. As for how, once you got in, you can either accumulate enough experience and apply on your own, or you request for secondment / mobility programme (but quite competitive and hard). If you are in audit or internal audit (hot at the moment), you might stand a chance. Otherwise, it is generally an unspoken rule that you should have a PR before you are being considered favourably. That is the general situation at the moment and I dunno if it will change, most like it wont. Long story short: get in, be in audit or internal audit, otherwise, get it, and get a PR along the way. Rare exceptions applies sometimes.

Cheers