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The 2024 Big 4 Transparency Awards

It might be busy season, but it’s also awards season. With the exception of the occasional (and usually highly unflattering) portrayal we get in media, accounting professionals don’t get much love at the Oscars so we’ve made our own awards based on what we care about!

Best Work Hours 🏆

On Big 4 Transparency we collect more than just compensation data because in guiding your career you should consider more than just the compensation. As I get older and wiser (and balder) one of the things that has become more and more of a deciding factor in where I want to work is the hours. So without further ado, here are the categories

Best Hours by Service Line

1st place: Industry accounting reported having the lowest average weekly hours worked with an average response of 43 hours per week.

2nd place: Internal audit was next up with 43.5 hours per week

3rd place: FP&A 43.6 hours per week on average.

Dishonorable mentions to Audit & Tax with 47.2 and 47.6 average weekly hours respectively.

Best Hours by Level

1st place: Interns with 42 average weekly hours

2nd place: Staff with 46 hours

3rd place: Seniors with 47.4 hours

This category actually surprised me with how clear the trend was. It was almost perfectly linear with more experienced levels reporting higher average weekly hours worked, topping out at Equity partners reporting just over 50 hours per week on average.

Best Hours By Firm

I’m going to caveat this one by specifying that only the larger firms (Top 30 by sample size) were considered because we did not want to include firms with too small of a sample size. On average, small firms reported the lowest hours.

1st place: Wipfli with 43.3 hours

2nd place: Grant Thornton with 44.7 hours

3rd place: Eide Bailly with 45.2 hours

Best Job Satisfaction 🏆

The next category is about where people have shown the greatest job satisfaction. We’ve broken it down by the same categories as the best hours worked awards.

Highest Job Satisfaction by Service Line

1st place: FP&A, with an average satisfaction rating of 7.2 out of 10

2nd place: Consulting with 6.9

3rd place: Industry Accounting with 6.8

Interestingly, Tax actually ranked in the middle of the pack with a 6.7 out of 10, while Internal Audit ranked the lowest with a 6.3 despite having good average reported hours.

Highest Job Satisfaction by Level

1st place: Interns with a 7.4

2nd place: Income Partners with a 7.0

3rd place: Tied between Managers and Equity partners with a 6.7

To no one’s surprise, Seniors reported the lowest job satisfaction with just under a 6.5.

Highest Job Satisfaction by Firm

With the same caveat on this excluding smaller firms, here are the winners:

1st place: Eide Bailly 7.44

2nd place: Moss Adams 7.23

3rd place: Plante Moran 7.15

My referral giveaway is going horribly, please send help

In the last newsletter I sent, I shared a picture of a sweet Casio calculator watch that was going to be given to whoever referred the most new readers to this newsletter. There’s also a Starbucks giftcard in it for you once you reach 25 referrals. But guess what… the current leader has less than 5 referrals. Yeah, less than 5! If you’re not cool enough to rock the Casio watch, I also have offered the cash value of $70 USD as a substitute for the winner. I like to think that sharing the joy of the Big 4 Transparency newsletter with others is enough to get you to do it, but think of how low the bar is to run away with the lead in this giveaway.

One last thing: have you checked out our podcast? I think it’s pretty sweet - I have 7 episodes out with firm owners, heads of talent & culture, an accounting manager at Google, and more cool folks. Check it out on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and just type in The Big 4 Transparency Podcast

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