Two years and 12 exams completed means that many trainee auditors are looking to life after audit. There is an undertone of disillusionment from the auditors. But I have also heard the same feelings from junior doctors and other professions. Is anyone happy in their work?

So this blog post looks at medicine as an alternative career path for the auditor. The two professions will each be judged on 13 scientific criteria. Then a winner shall be declared.

1.) Pay

They say money does not make you happy, but you’d be very unhappy doing either of these jobs for minimum wage. To dispel a myth – medicine is not any more lucrative than auditing. The average starting salary of £27k (£22k plus 20% supplement) for junior doctors is comparable to audit. The chart of salary against years of experience is also similar:

Accountant’s Salary:

 

Doctor’s Salary:

However, doctors will have spent two or three extra years in university before they can start their career. They will have extra student debt, but more crucially, they will be behind on the career pay ladder. There is also a much lower ceiling on maximum pay. While a good consultant can earn a six figure salary and a celebrity plastic surgeon may earn up to £1m, the best partners at a Big 4 accountancy firm could earn in excess of £1m. There is fat cat money available if the auditor makes it to the boardroom of a large company.

There is one caveat in that accountants can only earn the big money if they obtain the Chartered Accountancy qualification. Then they will inherit the riches of the Earth – or £79,100 to be more exact (this is the average ACA salary).

Doctors 0 – 1 Auditors

2.) Working Conditions

This is the standard public versus private sector debate. We pit the fat, ugly and lethargic NHS against the lean, competitive, fierce and beautiful audit stallions.

Doctors face the difficulty of working with diverse professional groups. They have authority over nurses but need their co-operation to keep the wards running smoothly. They have to work with pharmacists, without whom drugs cannot be obtained. There are even differences between doctors – medics and surgeons do not get along.

The doctor’s incentive to save lives has to compete with the bed manager’s priority of saving money. The hated bed manager was probably an accountant in a previous life. There are not many jobs where there is such divergence between management and staff. Friction is constant.

Auditors are very monocultural. All partners started off doing the endless hours of photocopying and invoice checking. Respect and knowledge of competence is, therefore, instant. Auditors tend work with other auditors. Even when they don’t, they will work with like-minded finance professionals. This fosters a greater sense of teamwork and there is less inherent friction.

Doctors 0 – 1 Auditors

3.) Information Technology

It is the joy of thousand-line Excel spreadsheets against the notoriously bad NHS IT. It is over-priced, doesn’t work and is based on MS-DOS. Medicine is constantly progressing, but that is at odds with a culture of tradition and status quo. Doctors don’t even use email that much. On the other hand, auditors cannot function without their laptops.

Doctors 1 – 0 Auditors (because huge Excel spreadsheets are bad for the eyes)

4.) Travel

Auditors face commutes to inconvenient client sites and hotel stays. But do enjoy occasional foreign travel (to Slough). Doctors live close to their place of work but face the risk of superbug infections.

Doctors 1 – 0 Auditors (because I believe in NHS hygiene)

5.) Airplane Situations

Every time they board a plane, doctors have the chance to be a hero or get sued horribly. It is usually the latter because there is little a doctor can do without his charts, drugs, stethoscopes and bed manager by his side to hold his hand.

There is a reason that auditors will never be asked to identify themselves on a plane – no-one ever needs an emergency stock count that badly.

Doctors 1 – 0 Auditors

6.) GMC verses the ICAEW

Accountants and medics are ruled by their respective professional institutions. For the qualified accountant you get a monthly magazine from the ICAEW for £300. For a new doctor, £400 gets you the right to be severely punished by the GMC. The value of membership is not an unread and unloved magazine, it is the right to call yourself a chartered accountant and the resulting salary increase.

Doctors 0 – 1 Auditors (because it is cheaper)

7.) Boredom

Work is varied for both the doctor and the auditor. Junior doctors will see different patients and work in different fields. Auditors will work at different clients throughout the year. They will return to the same clients year-on-year, but they will audit more complex areas and have more managerial responsibility.

The work can also be boring. Doctors could be on the same ward for months and years. There are only so many variations on a sore throat. Auditors do have to face the dirty work of checking endless near-identical invoices.

Doctors ½ – ½ Auditors (it’s only fair)

8.) Exams

Doctors study for longer. They face even more exams when they want to progress in their career (from junior doctor to registrar, and from registrar to consultant).

Auditors need to pass 15 exams to become qualified. It doesn’t feel like university has finished and they also have to work full time. Doctors can have as many attempts as they want, but auditors will get fired for failure.

However, the pain only lasts for three years and there are no further exams after qualification. Text books and exam entry fees also get paid for and (ample) study leave is provided.

Doctors 0 – 1 Auditors (because it is cheaper)

9.) Consequences of Failure

No-one has ever died from a bad audit, but the partner can be sent to jail. The corollary for medicine is more fatal. But who wants to focus on failure? Success in medicine means better quality and length of life. Audits are mandatory, so success means the (mere) fulfilment of the law.

Doctors 1 – 0 Auditors

10.) Flexibility

Doctors will always be doctors and escape from that career path is quite impossible. A Chartered Accountancy qualification opens up many different career paths in finance and business. Working abroad is also more feasible. Although, you will always need to carry a calculator.

Doctors 0 – 1 Auditors

11.) The Hours

In practice, the medicine and accounting professions do not recognise the European Working Time Directive 48-hour weekly work limit. Both work long hours without overtime pay.

However the auditors lot is much better, neither night shifts nor weekend working are mandatory. Auditor’s also have greater flexibility with their time. If you need to take time off work, as long as there is internet, you can catch up later. It takes a brave doctor to leave a sick patient and they can’t be carried home.

Doctors 0 – 1 Auditors

12.) Job Security

There will always be work for doctors and accountants in any civilised society. But you feel that people will choose health over accurate bookkeeping. This is despite my argument that accounting was more important than medicine during my interview.

Doctors 1 – 0 Auditors

13.) TV Shows

The TV industry will have run out of good ideas when they make a show about auditors. Medicine is spoiled for choice: House, Grey’s Anatomy and Scrubs (and I can go on). I believe that a show about recurring manual controls failure without a compensating control can be made but it will never happen.

Doctors 1 – 0 Auditors

 

The Final Score

Doctors 6 ½ – 6 ½ Auditors

A draw! The blog post is somewhat irrelevant, because the decision to be a doctor needed to be made over 8 years ago. The grass is never greener on the other side because it is actually a sheer-faced cliff. But I will return to work on Monday and hear moans about the job – and I will be one of them. Shouldn’t we learn to be happy where we are or should we still chase the dream of retirement by 26?

Are auditors different from the rest of society? This article will lower the barriers between them so that we can all hold hands under perfect blue skies.

From The Same Crop

Yes, auditors are human. What other answers are there?

The trainees are currently at college studying for exams. We can wear what we wish and take leisurely one hour lunches in the park. At first glance, we just look like a group of unemployed students. The bulk comes from regular universities: Manchester, Nottingham, Bristol, Warwick and Durham. We support the same football teams, listen to the same music and talk about the same things. Our mundane aim is to lead secure, quiet lives with a stable income – all the same as everyone else.

 

A Breed Apart

But look more carefully at the unemployed students you will notice some differences: the designer sunglasses (Ray Bans inevitably), the insatiable appetite and ability to pay for daily Starbucks Lattes, the intellectual conversations about the merits of taking two calculators to exams. It is not the same.

So, auditors are human, but of a distinct kind. To explain, all dogs are dogs, but only some are Border Collies (who incidentally rank number 1 in Coren’s Intelligence of Dogs).

These characteristics set apart auditors:

1) Devastating Scrabble Players
Auditors are clever. I said earlier that they came from ordinary universities. But the true meaning of that is they come from good families, came the top of good schools, scored a 2:1 degree from a good university, passed the psychometric testing and beat other good graduates. How can this not be scrabble playing elite?

2) Tidy Bedrooms
Auditors are organised. This gives them the foresight to apply for a graduate job before actually graduating. It also gives them the ability to manage work, exams, social lives and lip reading classes without the need of a time machine.

3) Keen Runners
Auditors are hard working. The industry has a reputation for long hours. This attracts auditors to the discipline, grind, pain and sheer satisfaction of running. On the basis of the regular emails requesting sponsorship for some run, each auditor runs 3.7 marathons per year.

4) Safe With Your PIN Number
Auditors are reliable and accountable. In the face of all adversity and danger, the audit work will always be complete.

The Change

I have described the model of professionalism, but I am not close to that. Everyone still makes mistakes and still learns, even the partners. However, that process of change from student to professional is most stark among the trainees. I’ve gained a lot of knowledge and experience in my two years so far. My expectations have changed – Pizza Express has turned from a treat to a chore. Yet, a lot of trainees still hold their student-dreams of travelling, pursuing their real passions and making a difference to society. Change is natural with or without a job, but working for a professional services firm makes it much faster.

So in just one article I say that auditors are like everyone else, but are an elite, and the trainees are transitioning from studenthood to the elite. It’s a flaky, unsatisfying conclusion. But (in a pretentious and noble-sounding way), that is life.

There are 286,000 qualified accountants and 169,000 accountancy students in the UK (source: FRC). That means you can’t avoid them for your whole life. This blog post will explain where accountants come from and what motivates them.

The Defensive Play

It was once believed that accountants were delivered by storks while sucking their thumb and clutching a calculator. Modern biology proved that accountancy is not a natural career choice. Show me a child who aspires to be an accountant and I will show you the telephone number of a good therapist.

Accountants are actually produced from the “Big 4” accountancy factory (the four largest firms who dominate the industry). Fresh university graduates are the raw materials and they take three years to process. They are lured through the gates because the training contract offers:

• Stable employment
• A free chartered accountancy qualification (the “ACA”). Qualification means a large pay rise and near-guaranteed job security for life.
• Good work experience with exposure to many different aspects of a business

For these reasons, accountancy is a defensive play for 90% of trainees. It is a safe option for the graduate who is unsure about their long terms career goals. By simply doing as you are told for three years you will end up with valuable work experience and qualifications. No thought is required and the long-term serious career decisions are deferred.

It is a safe and pragmatic career choice. But that’s the way accountants should be.

The Machiavellian View

The cynical view is that trainees are entirely self-serving and leave as soon as the training contract ends, having conned the ACA from their employers.

However, this Machiavellian view is acceptable to the Big 4 because they easily extract enough value from their trainees. They perform a great bulk of the fieldwork at the client.  Even though the ACA is a great expense the cost is recovered many times over. A trainee is charged out at over £100 for every hour that he works at the client. A trainees will earn around £350,000 in profit for the firm during their contract period.

A lot of trainees do leave after qualification but the business model is not designed for all of them to stay. Otherwise, there would be too many assistant managers.

However, the three years are not just a relationship of convenience. The firms do want you to stay after qualification even if it is not as an accountant. They will make efforts to find placements elsewhere. Possible destinations include other business areas of the firm, such as advisory, placements at the client and placements abroad.

Trainees are not solely treated as a resource but as valued members. This is why the Big 4 do well in employee satisfaction surveys.

The Meaning of Audit

Accountancy is a good career – but why do any work at all? Accountants do have dreams of lying on a beach for half the year and skiing for the other half. But that would be a waste of immense talent. Also, modern civilisation would collapse if there was no-one to audit the accounts.

We agree that work is necessary. On the basic level, we need to earn money for food and shelter from bandits. However, should we expect fulfilment and satisfaction from our work, or is it just a means to an end?

Inevitably, accountancy is just a 9 to 5 job for a lot of people. I have joined in the bitching and moaning sessions while at work. But I have also met those who do enjoy auditing. It is more satisfying to work with them. They get the unpopular label of being “keen”, but it is the geeks who do well at school, not the jocks.

My Story

I wanted to become a chartered accountant after doing some work experience while I was in school. I did the usual amount of photocopying and filing. But I spent the bulk of the summer making over 100 archive boxes to store old files. This proved to be valuable experience because I won the first year trainee box making challenge. I was impressed by the importance of my bosses work and the respect that he got from his clients.

During university, I did some summer work in a chemical factory. I spent many 8 hour shifts lining up plastic bottles and stacking them on pallets. I vowed never to do any more menial work and to go for a challenging career. That’s why I am an accountant.

I didn’t know about the dire days I would have counting things on pallets and sifting through endless invoices. But I like the people and the work can be interesting. It’s pleasing to understand and apply a complicated accounting standard while at work. So like most people, I fall between the pragmatists and idealists on the purpose of work. Like most trainees, I’m still deferring the decision on what I will do after I qualify. But I will enjoy the time in between.

Work isn’t meant to fulfil your Ultimate Life Purpose™. It isn’t your whole identity. But it is OK to have fun auditing.