It must be survey season so since you kids received the last one so well (surely I jest), we humbly present this latest survey of 1,217 Intuit small business and 1,200 Intuit accountant customers between Oct. 15 – 20, 2010. Thanks, Intuit!
The good news is that there really is no good news but that hasn’t put a damper on survey respondents’ view of things to come. It’s sort of exceptional, in our opinion, that 75 – 80% of respondents feel today’s economic climate is just fair or poor but more than that feel optimistic about opportunities in the future.
In a considerable showing of resilience, 65 percent of accounting professionals and 54 percent of small business owners said their companies grew in the last 12 months. Despite this growth, 75 percent of accounting professionals and 80 percent of small business owners rate today’s economic climate as “just fair” or “poor.”
Both groups expressed optimism for the future, with 94 percent of accounting professionals and 87 percent of small business owners seeing opportunities to grow their businesses in today’s economy.
Well if there are going to be new opportunities once things look up, where are they going to come from? According to respondents, news and technology are the key:
77 percent of accounting professionals said “access to industry news and/or trends” is the most important; “investing in new technology” ranked second.
73 percent of small business owners placed “marketing and/or advertising” as the most important; 57 percent said they plan to focus on “expanding their range of offerings.”
Funny, Sage just asked 533 accountants and IT professionals what keeps them up at night and they responded with getting new clients and regulatory compliance. For Intuit’s respondents, however, client retention ranked higher than finding new ones.
When asked what keeps them up at night, 32 percent of accounting professionals said “keeping clients happy.” For 26 percent of small businesses, “paying bills” is their number one concern.
Fine, so what does all this mean?
“Accounting professionals and small business owners are extremely adaptable and flexible individuals,” said Shawn McMorrough, lead research manager of Intuit’s Accounting Professionals Division. “Despite feeling the pinch in this challenging economic environment, they are optimistic and continue to weather the rapidly shifting business environment. Their unrelenting passion for serving their customers helps accounting professionals and small businesses succeed in the face of any challenge the market presents them.”
Should the rest of the world take that as a good sign that things aren’t as bad as Jr Deputy Accountant, Michael Panzner and the Mogambo Guru might make it seem? It looks that way, though the doomsayers are still in business for the foreseeable future. Yay?
In 2017, I made $29 as an tax intern at big daddy D but I am not sure where I was in the range of compensation for interns at that time…but in today’s economy I think $30 is very low. $40 seems fair considering how much starting salaries have grown in the last couple of years.
Cut your losses and jump ship.
Long timer CPA
With master’s in taxation and other master’s degree in business, I believe working for a CPA firm is a loss of time.
Unfortunately, time is the only valuable assets you have if you are not one of the chosen in the firm because of personality, revenue, shear ability, labor on fixed salary or nepotism, then you lose as the firm will always monitor utilization and profit per employee. You become less useful and a fixed cost, thus management team never tries to expand $$/hour or deeply train skills of underlying’s because it’s all about being a highly paid partner and making a trip to the deposit box. And that deposit timeframe only last so long and they know it.
Not necessarily defending PwC, but maybe keep in mind a few things: (1) These are college students, not graduates. (2) Many internships and summer jobs pay substantially less (even minimum wage). (3) There’s a lot of fluff in Big 4 internships, like group trips to fun locations, “community projects,” etc.
It’s not like PwC is going to make any real money off work performed by interns. It’s ultimately just a cost center for the firm, to try & recruit a fresh class on new hires when they graduate.