I left EY audit for D&P/Kroll 3 years ago. Love the flexibility, way less politics, and getting paid/promoted based on my work rather than tenure. Bad part is it that it can be more demanding at times than audit as people rely on your work a more to make decisions in a short period of time. However, the demanding parts of the job are usually short lived unlike getting staffed on a poor audit engagement.
I worked in FDD. It's definitely an upgrade from audit overall and worth the jump if you can get it. The main con is just that the work can be extremely demanding. Most buy-sides are only 3 weeks long, which means you can be cranking heavily if the data is bad (spoiler - a lot of MM companies being bought out have crappy financials/data). Sell-sides are better, but it gets old having to continuously do roll-forwards, plus at my firm, the expectation was that sell-sides are easier, so you'd be doing multiple things at once.
I don't think the job security piece is necessarily worth noting because you can always go back to audit/financial reporting if you get laid off. Yeah, it sucks, but those roles always need people and you're still a CPA, so I think you'll be fine. The major negative, besides the hours, is the skill-set is kind of niche and sometimes harder to sell companies on. You don't have the financial modeling or deep deal expertise that IB guys will have and you don't have quite as strong of GAAP knowledge or understanding of financial processes to build on as people in AAS/Audit will have either. I personally found exits for non-transactional roles from FDD to be a bit harder than I'd have liked them to be.
Everything is better, worrying about getting laid off sucks
I left EY audit for D&P/Kroll 3 years ago. Love the flexibility, way less politics, and getting paid/promoted based on my work rather than tenure. Bad part is it that it can be more demanding at times than audit as people rely on your work a more to make decisions in a short period of time. However, the demanding parts of the job are usually short lived unlike getting staffed on a poor audit engagement.
Not really
I worked in FDD. It's definitely an upgrade from audit overall and worth the jump if you can get it. The main con is just that the work can be extremely demanding. Most buy-sides are only 3 weeks long, which means you can be cranking heavily if the data is bad (spoiler - a lot of MM companies being bought out have crappy financials/data). Sell-sides are better, but it gets old having to continuously do roll-forwards, plus at my firm, the expectation was that sell-sides are easier, so you'd be doing multiple things at once.
I don't think the job security piece is necessarily worth noting because you can always go back to audit/financial reporting if you get laid off. Yeah, it sucks, but those roles always need people and you're still a CPA, so I think you'll be fine. The major negative, besides the hours, is the skill-set is kind of niche and sometimes harder to sell companies on. You don't have the financial modeling or deep deal expertise that IB guys will have and you don't have quite as strong of GAAP knowledge or understanding of financial processes to build on as people in AAS/Audit will have either. I personally found exits for non-transactional roles from FDD to be a bit harder than I'd have liked them to be.