Audit to Transaction Advisory Services

I was hoping someone who had experience in audit for a big 4 firm in NYC who moved within the same firm in the same office could provide insight. It's a much different scenario than moving to smaller accounting firm in a region that isn't NYC.

TAS definitely has more finance-type work (e.g., building valuation models, researching precedent transactions). However, there is also a good amount of reviewing other valuations, which is definitely like "glorified auditing" and horrible, in my opinion. Having experienced both TAS (full time) and audit (interning), TAS is far better.

This varies a lot office to office, group to group, partner to partner. Naming convention may vary, but these groups bring in Channel 1 (audit client) and Channel 2 (non-audit client) engagements. Channel 1 work is generally "glorified auditing"; audit teams will send over transactions to be reviewed by the appropriate teams. Purchase price allocations and fair value impairments are common examples of Channel 1 work. Channel 2 work is typically more interesting and can be very diverse; this is where the Big 4 attempts to compete with the services of consulting firms and banks. In the real estate group, Channel 2 work often consisted of transaction underwriting & due diligence, lease vs own analysis, and site selections.

On a national platform, TAS does a lot of interesting work, but its easy to be sold/blinded by cool projects that other offices get to work on. If you're considering TAS, I recommend doing extra research about your specific group, office, and partner, they all have specialties and you'll spend most of your time working on that.

Very helpful. Much appreciated.

I have family who works in this area for one of the Big 4 and I've done an internship in one. Is it glorified auditing? For the most part yes. Is it better than vanilla auditing? Absolutely.

There are basically two sides: Financial Due Diligence and Valuation work. FDD is typically working on M&A deals, divestitures, and carve outs. You're working with bankers and the company with all of the nitty gritty accounting stuff. For example, let's say a PE firm is looking to buy a company. The IB will do their valuation / sales work and get the deal 90% through. Then FDD comes in to do a quickie audit to make sure there are no red flags from the accounting side (it's a little more sexy than that).

On the Valuations side you're doing stuff like valuing goodwill to see if it's impaired. You can also do some more interesting modelesque work, but it's not as front-office as IBD. As with FDD, you're doing similar stuff, but more accounting focused.

Pros - they typically pay a little better. More interesting work. More exposure to interesting people (w/in the firm and outside). These groups are typically the big dogs in the accounting firms and are the most profitable and therefore have quite a bit of sway.

Cons - You can end up working banking hours but with much worse pay. You're still an accountant.

Exit Ops - Up w/in the firm. Out to internal accounting / finance anywhere from a FS to Industrial company. Out to a corporate development team, if you're lucky (this will most likely be on an integration team). MBA, although getting into a top program w/out some sexier, more interesting experience can be tough. But with good stats and execution Booth or Wharton aren't out of the question.

The answer is dependent on what your long term goals. Since you said you are not a CPA I assume you don't want to stay in accounting so go try to get a transfer to advisory.

I have a question for you as well. How easy is it to transfer from audit to advisory at KPMG?

I would say senior

I would say senior and try to negotiate taking a year or so off of the track to manager (i.e. come in as an S2 or something vs an s1). TAS is already different from audit, and I wouldn't want the expectations of being a manager on top of trying to take in everything that's needed to do the job.

First off - Question wasn't clear, had to click into the post to understand what you were asking.

To answer your question - I've seen people enter TAS from either group. However, most of the deals you would work will be industry related and not financial institutions. Auditing non-financial services clients will give you an advantage... That being said TAS can be just as bad as audit (emphasis on can). I would suggest networking hard to get over to banking even at small shop.

Nope.

I'm saying that from my experience TAS is not all its cracked up to be in comparison to audit and the time and effort to get over would be better spent networking into banking.

No headhunter is going to recruit you from audit to bank, you'll need to network your butt off but what I'm saying is that it would be worth it. I would also argue that general audit and exposure to different industries will be much move valuable than auditing financial institutions.

Network and CFA. Could also do a modeling prep course.

This is the answer to virtually every question concerning an individual wishing to switch from a non-finance role to a finance role without getting an MBA.

I don't think a CFA would be necessary, but would likely help your case. i would also suggest that you look at IB now or start looking at MBA programs if IB is what you really want. As long as you can learn the modeling and concepts (I'm guessing you already know accounting) you can likely get an analyst spot at a boutique.

IA to TAS is going to be a very difficult direct transition unless you come from one of the few F100 companies that keep their internal FDD or transaction support folks under the IA/Risk Management/Project Management umbrellas and have experience on that work. I only know of 3 companies which do this (1 is F500, 2 F100) and none are in the professional services space. Even the smaller firms like their TAS folks to have some experience and the Big 4 firms have too much internal competition to need to hire inexperienced candidates externally at the experienced hire level.

Your best bet is to join a mid-tier or Big 4 firm in their audit practice (they would probably take 2 years of IA = 1 year audit experience and make you a 2nd year/experienced associate but don't be surprised if they try to say 1st year if you didn't have a risk based audit plan). You can then try to transition after ~2 years in the role although you should know there is tons of internal competition for those moves. Another option would be to work under a CPA now, find a way to get certified in your state, and apply for roles in Accounting Advisory. It's not going to develop the most applicable skill set for TAS but would get you with a firm under the "advisory" umbrella and if you're sneaky you can position yourself to work on deal accounting and at least network with TAS folks.

If your goal is IB, I'd spend the next year studying for your GMAT to get a 700+ and get that out of the way since an MBA would be necessary for IB and helpful for TAS recruiting. If your goal is TAS you should know that you'll probably need a transitional role unless you work at one of the companies which has you doing that work now.