What are your opinions on audit?

Audit sucks. It’s really boring. 

Mr. Steal-your-girl if you're a PhD student

Agree with Isaiah though. Stable but boring which imo sucks. 

it's boring as fuck. It's actually remarkable how boring it is.

I had an older relative spend their career at the Big 4. Made ~$300k-400k as a standard partner, ~$500k-600k as a senior regional partner, and ~$1-1.25M+ as a national managing partner. Most will never get anywhere near there, but it also wasn’t the top end either - the C-suite adjacent partners are more like $2-3M. They’re now retired with a mid six figure cash pension. First two were upper MCOL cities (think Chicago / Atlanta / Dallas), while the last leg was in NYC. 

Might not be the numbers people in PE / HF / IB aspire for, but for 99%+ of people this would be an extremely successful career.
 

Even if you never progress past line partner, $300-400k of cash comp and a couple hundred a year in retirement is extremely cushy. It’s stressful as hell to get to partner and most burn out or get coached out, and partners are just as stressed (arguably moreso), but your sales (in audit, at least) are also largely tied to recurring, legally-mandated, annual expenditures. If you bail to industry, you can still jump into CorpFin at an accelerated pace vs climbing the F500 ladder internally
 

Burnt-out senior associates and comp-obsessed bankers will tell you to avoid, and no one will deny that it’s stressful, (relatively) underpaid, and boring, but objectively it’s still a great place to start your career

Audit has most of the downsides of consulting with less upside. They're paid far too little to put up with busy season

It's all trajectory and interest dependent.

If you're interested in digging through old excel files that don't foot and begging the finance team for support, but having busy season be three 60 hour weeks, then it's a good gig. 

If you're not interested in 2% bonuses, then it's likely not for you.

I've worked in audit and know people in audit. 

As above, I'd say if you make it to partner then yes, it can pay pretty well. You really just need to ask yourself if the ends justify the means (not trying to make it dramatic, its an office job):

Pros:

- High percentage chance of promotion and pay increase each year. As long as you do good, have a good reputation and don't get staffed on bad jobs, there is a good chance you will get promoted and a pay bump. As they say, theres the stairs and the elevator to the top; i know people who basically lucked out and got the elevator. 

- if you go B4 thats great name recognition on a resume, opens a lot of doors. The longer you stay the better you're looked upon in the job market. Also, B4 gives great training which is highly looked upon. A lot of the things you learn at B4 are very transferable and you see a lot but not deep level. 

- Lot of "fun" events, networking, you do get to travel a lot if on the right client. I'm a CPA myself, but more a banking/investing guy than anything else. If I had to draw a line between banking and accounting firms, I'd say the accounting firms had people who are a little more "quirky" which isn't bad, just different.

Cons:

- Biggest con to me is, you really, don't do anything. Meaning, you do a bunch of work in terms of test of details, test of controls, but every audit report says "the goal isn't to determine fraud". An audit report, at its heart, is just someone asking you, "is this correct" and you going "yea i guess", because really you are sampling, and millions of dollars are immaterial to big companies. Essentially, you are just checking work in probably a 1/20 of the time that was used to prepare the work. Being an auditor is also like being a personal trainer, you have to give the client results, but if you push them too hard they will prob find a trainer who goes lighter on them. 

- Hate to say its boring, or lack of prestige, but thats what it is when it comes down to it. Its why every financial movie is about trading or banking but never audit. Most of the time you're in a back room, trying to get documents from people (a) prob hate their jobs/don't know what they are doing (b) don't want to talk to you. Add on top of that, if you're somewhat young, you need to keep your head down in terms of what other people are doing with their careers, because you really question working for 50K in busy season when some of your friends get bonuses that big. 

- There's probably a good chance  you won't make partner anyway, and prob most of that is out of your control. There's also a lot of inter-office politics. Mostly around billable hours. All work is bid on, so the lowest bid usually wins, which means shoe-string budgets, resulting in less billable hours. So even if you want to do more work on something, or you put in 10 hours of good work, the partner asks you to bill 5 hours of work, then your review gets messed up at year end for not having enough billable hours. 

I don't have any experience in Audit but my buddy does, and he does not like it. I guess it just depends on personal preference. 

It’s not bad. Really depends on your team, industry, and what interests you. My main client does a lot of transactions and deals which means a lot of technical accounting work and memos which I find interesting. Other clients are just retail inventory with counts and extrapolations and confirms for large cash balances/level 1 investments, which can be pretty boring although easy. Some clients are hard to work with and aren’t very knowledgeable. Others are top notch, make bank, and give you an idea of what you can exit to if you play your cards right. It’s usually pretty flexible and pay is not bad - make around $70k (salary and bonus) as an A2 in a lcol area in the South at my firm. Some firms pay much better than others. Average working 9am to 6pm most days with some short busy weeks for the 10-Qs. Busy season on large accelerated filers is like 10am to 2:00am or 3:00am Monday through Friday in the months of January and February. Most of the firms are still virtual/hybrid - depends on client though. Exits vary but rn I’m consistently getting offers for Senior positions in industry at around $85k to $95k with bonus ranges from 5% to 10%. Higher up is better pay and opportunities but they also get more flexibility - I know several managers and directors who are on month long plus vacays rn. I take around a month off in December and the first week of January. 
 

Overall I enjoy it enough and it gives a good amount of flexibility to pursue your other interests as long as you get the work done. The skill set and experience is really what you make it. You can definitely cruise or you can put in some effort and get very knowledgeable in your space in both the accounting and business sidelines. Hope that helps/gives you an idea about the job.

Started my career in audit then made the switch to restructuring consulting.

IMO B4 audit is the best place to start for a non target kid. Big 4 audit was often the best path for those of us who didn't grow up with a ton of money (grew up pretty poor tbh) or with parents in the corporate world. Certainly a safe and boring career, but goddamn do the partners make a ton of money. All my partners cleared 1m the year I left

Full of back office Barry’s

Public accounting on the audit side is a great career path. B4 will give you some ‘prestige’ but smaller shops will get you exposed to a lot of different businesses. Plenty of exit opps as well. Every CPA I know has down very well.

Great way to start your career in offshore jurisdictions, then go into industry and make at least double for less work

Was an auditor. Managed to move to a hedge fund doing TMT long/short equity after a year and a half. 

It's not a bad career path at all, whatever people say here. Do your time in the Big 4, move to some controllership role that pays low six figures, punch the clock 9-to-5, have your sh*t... and before you know it, you're a CFO.

There are plenty of hedge fund analysts who can't find work after 36 and are still chasing that one big bonus -- but I don't know of any unemployed CPA's.

I think audit is a great long term career but I would just hate the first 5-7 years. I remember talking to a girl I was interning under and she said she worked at KPMG audit around 2014-2016. She said she made around $47k total como starting out working 70 hours a week. Yes you can get to $200k a year in 10 ish years working 40 hours a week but I just think doing IB to start out and then a corp dev role at year 6 ish you will be making 140-180k and have been able to invest a lot more upfront early in your career. If you go PE in LMM you will easily surpass the amount you make over audit and probably enjoy the type of work you are doing more. It seems to me as a no brainer but it depends on what you want to do and what you like.

tech/finance > law/med > accounting

Auditing be like:

Most people over the age of 30 don't really give 2 fucks about what your career is as long as it's respectable and it's clear you're not a deadbeat. The prestige whoring and dick measuring over titles usually ends in your late-20s after most folks have had a taste of the real world and become cynical about Corporate America and climbing the ladder. 

With that said, I started out in Audit and it absolutely wasn't for me. I was on the low-end of "average" for my audit class because the work didn't jive well at all with me. I have a somewhat rebellious personality in that I hate doing things that don't make any sense "just because" and audit is the absolute worst profession for someone like this. Lots of jobs have bullshit tasks, but audit takes the cake with unnecessary documentation, checklists, tests, etc. that add no value but are mandated by the SEC and therefore are required. I ironically did just fine in Transaction Services and in my Data Analytics roles, which are supposed to be more challenging/ambiguous day-to-day, but was a very mediocre auditor.

That's not to say audit teaches you nothing. I'm working in data analytics now and wouldn't have gotten there without the business sense I developed from working as a CPA for many years in my career. Hard skills like understanding financial statements, how systems work, designing processes that minimize risk, and even making sure things tie-out/being able to figure out why things don't reconcile have all been valuable skills I've used in the data world so far. You'd be surprised how many people on my team can create ML models but don't even bother to check if the numbers on the schedule they created tie-out to the source.

So yeah, audit isn't a glamorous career and it's definitely not something you should choose over IB/MBB ever, but you can still have a very solid career if you choose to pursue accounting, whether it's as a Partner or CFO, and you can pivot to a lot of different things with your background as a CPA. Some examples of non-obvious careers I've seen people pivot into (without an MBA) after getting their CPA: Corporate Development, Investment Banking, Strategy Consulting, Data Analytics, ERP Consulting, Restructuring Consulting, Corporate Banking