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I’m fed up of ACAs desperate to get out of boring accounting jobs who interview for heavyweight roles best left for those of us with real financial skills. These bottom feeders are the cheap option all the rest of us have to compete with. I don’t hate them for being bean-counters, I hate them for driving down my compensation.
When I worked in banking, the ex-accountants were the ones no-one wanted to be forced to work with. I’ve lost count of the number of times my colleagues and I groaned inwardly when we were staffed with the spotty guy who used to work at one of the Big Four firms. As well as the usual stress and last-minuteism prevalent in M&A, it meant picking up their slack and teaching them hard finance.
None of us were particularly surprised when Andersen went belly up. It was just desserts for the industry which became the bag-man for listed companies, signing off on their dodgy accounts and cross-selling them all sorts of other useless “professional services”.
These Orwellian institutions have departments with names like “Strategic Performance Improvement” and “Enterprise Applications” which hide a multitude of sinful consulting fees. Clients don’t mind paying through the nose since getting the stamp of approval of a big name with a global presence makes their lives a lot easier and removes their own accountability.
Junior ACA’s are the soft underbelly of these firms, all pin-striped and firm hand-shakes but with little real financial insight.
I recently received a sellside information memorandum written by one such rocket scientist: typos on the first page, mistakes in the valuation, glaring errors and omissions in the business plan. We heard on the grapevine that the client had paid a five figure sum and waited three crucial weeks to get this sixty-page doormat.
There are of course exceptions to the rule. But since they are used to being poorly paid, all ACA’s tend to under-cut the market. In the process, they create a minimum wage which provides an excuse for employers to negotiate lower packages for all.
What can you do if you’re an MBA who’s bursting to get into investment banking nevertheless?
My advice is to make sure you acknowledge the learning curve you’ll face. Be realistic upfront about it. Don’t expect those three letters to mean much to me. As the saying goes: it’s just another TLA.
And given that no-one wants to get stuck talking to an accountant at a party, make sure you’ve read a good book or been to a decent movie recently. If I’m recruiting someone whom I’m going to have to talk to every day, the last thing you need is to come across as boring as the “nerdy bean-counter” stereotype suggests.
The author is a former banker-turned private equity professional.
You clearly have high standards. Great grammar in the very first sentence. “I’m fed up of ACAs”. brilliant
“What can you do if you’re an MBA who’s bursting to get into investment banking nevertheless? ”
He talks of typos on the first page yet can’t write an article properly.
After battering the economy and the common mans livelihood you have now come to berating the most distunguished profession in the world ! ACA’s have probably studied twice as hard as bankers, with a lower pay package only because they are motivated to learn grass root business skills, something bankers have always got wrong – the fundamentals, and here we are today, the FTSE hovering at 6000 from its peak 2 years ago at 6600. With all the regulation coming in place you shouldnt be talking like that anymore, bankers have now reached the lowest point in the value chain.
..banking 101 doesn’t sound smart – just lazy. We can all do that. For example
“.brilliant” should read “.Brilliant”
pedantry masquerading as intelligence. Nothing reveals the ambitious but untalented more.
I await the typical response from the amateur
As an ACA myself, I agree with some of this article, at the same time I question what unique talents the author really has. Anyway your average big 4 ACA is good at exams and hard working but has little more to offer. Furthermore I think the pedantry of the first two posters shows what a typical ACA is really like.
For someone who puts out s/he’s got business skills this is an absurd commentary. Microeconomics 101: companies pay economic value for work done. Why pay an MBA more if an ACA can do the same work for less? If ACAs were useless no one would hire them.
MBAs are overrated in any case and people pay way too much to study it when they would be far better served with a specialist master’s course or accountancy. Just because someone’s shown an MBA how to do a DCF analysis and how to spell the words “strategy” and “derivative” doesn’t mean they (the MBA graduates) have any value.
The image of the accountant as boring and spotty is passe. Bankers are the new whipping boys. Bad accountants might help wreck a company (Enron, WorldCom). Bad bankers wreck the whole economy (Ireland, Lehman).
ACA’s are and always will be the lowest of the low. Total parasites. Ask yourself this, if they really knew anything about business why do they spend all their time auditing others accounts. I have total sympathy with the author. Those who can…do. Those who can’t…audit.
Many angry ACA responses. If the author had been sent through the strategic language correction utilization consultancy arm of one of the big four the grammar mistake may have been avoided. Can’t agree more with the author, exorbitant fees for mediocre services.
Grammar ?! Punctuation !! Don’t the youth of today know where to put an apostrophe ? ACAs, ACA’s. Do YOU know ?
he is right.. i hate accountants and lawyers.. they are after all the underlings who serve the royal bankers and traders.. we hired one of the Big 4 at my old BB shop. the guys were supposed to provide a third opinion on our structured product. what ended up happening was that they copied our model in excel, re-ran the numbers and wrote a 50 page peice of boredom! Good thing we took the hammer with us when we negotiated the pay for the job. And nailed it down to 20K GBP for 6 months of grunt work
This article should be titled as “Lame conclusion from lame ex-banker writing probably lame PE client reports”. Wasted my 2 minutes reading it and 1 additional minute writing a comment on it.
Boring!
What he says is true though – why hire an ACA who couldn’t get into front office first time round?
When will accountants realise that they are merely enablers, decision support – number crunchers with low level skills and nothing else.
They are all overpaid, largely due to high level entry bars, via a controlled & manipulated exam system that would make a Trade Unionist blush.
Keep ‘em in a small dark hole and feed’ em spreadsheets to keep quiet. We all have to patronise nerds on occasion! It is important for the Business to keep them under control and away from the core decision making.
Involving accountants into decision making or business forums is like allowing Barnes Wallis fly the bomber!
)…Let’s have a look at what M&A really is
MBAs desperately trying to convince clients to waste money in buying companies which are either too expensive or offering no real synergies or too difficult to integrate
M&A skills, well let’s think about them
DCF and multiple valuation – buy a couple of books on Amazon and you are done … well you have still to learn the tricks required to inflate prices witout being too easily discovered
Deal structuring ? Please, call a lawyer and a tax expert
Financial due diligence ? Please no, call an audit firm
Raising capital ? Please, call the guys from the capital markets
Fancy powerpoint presentations ? Yes, here we are, call an M&A banker. Guys, why don’t you think of doing something serious in life and stop complaining about how your talents (???) are not appreciated by your bosses and the whole world !
Clients don’t mind paying through the nose since getting the stamp of approval of a big name with a global presence makes their lives a lot easier and removes their own accountability.
SO TRUE!
I have an accounting qualification and a MSC finance from one of the best universities on the planet. I can tell you the Accounting qualification is a waste of time and paper and ACA’s should be banned from banking
I am a Big 4 qualified ACA who made the transition to M&A (now at a BB). During my analyst year (I was taken on as a 3rd year analyst) I found that my accounting skills were very useful, partiularly when it came to modelling (building integrated balance sheet, p&l and cashflow). Was ahead of peers on this and therefore had more time to pick up banking skills. All in all a good route in my opinion – I’m now a VP and loving it.
The world without chartered accountant would be very messy jumble of numbers where the investment banker would really have to count beans ( kidding). MBAs and ACAs have very different purpose. Having said that, ACAs have good transferable skills if properly applied and developed can equal or be better than an MBA. Unfortunately, one of the flip side of the good technical training that ACA develop is that they think they are not business advises even they think so. The sooner they realise this the sooner they will become a good advise or whatever they chose. An MBA on the other hand would struggle to transfer his learnt MBA skills straight in a job. The MBA will have to learn those skills from experience. But one the great qualities of an experienced MBA is it does give on a holistic view of a business situation and they can adapt easily to the changing business environment. On investment bankers, although they think they are great at what they do, they are much of the time clueless and as lucky as a monkey rolling a dice. A majority of investment bankers are very good at manipulating the figures provided by accounting function but have no clue how those numbers are built up
WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? Everybody who wanna be good with number should do 2 years of audit!!! there is maybe a reason of why in a big 4 usually people working in corporate and transaction got a experience in audit?
is funny what you say really funny, because maybe is something real, but in fact you are just crying beacuse your pay is low….
Utter twaddle I’m afraid, and not supported by the facts. Chartered Accountants often hold extremely high level jobs in the economy (just look at the statistics of the number holding CFO & CEO positions) and partenters of accounting firms generally earn considerably more than ‘bankers’ and have much lower volatility of earnings and longevity of career. Unfortunately most bankers understand little about real business issues outside of abstruse and utterly useless derivative knowledge. For example, a decent knowledge of tax can save a company billions or an individual tens of millions – whereas a good knowlegde of calculating the bond futures basis, or the ability to price a swap isn’t exactly transferable or useful. And as for the claim that we simply provide information – well of course we do; but that is the whole point – good information is the most valuable commodity in business, and the gatekeepers of it are the most powerful.