Related Posts
Bowl Leader
Mentor
More Posts
New to Chicago - how do I find new friends here?
Anyone use Ashwagandha? What type/brand?
Updated my wifi SSID
Conversation Starter
Additional Posts in Accounting
Had 2 hours of billable work today 💀
When does working weekends start?
Top worst audit industries?
New to Fishbowl?
Download the Fishbowl app to
unlock all discussions on Fishbowl.
unlock all discussions on Fishbowl.
That’s not right EY1. I never eat hours and blow budgets all the time. Granted, I keep my managers in the loop and enter in the comments when I enter time as well. I make sure everyone is aware that if I’m blowing budget, it’s either because I found an issue or client didn’t provide good PBCs. More than likely, we won’t charge client extra if there were a few PBC’s that weren’t good for us and we had to do some extra work.
OP don’t let EY1’s mentality get you. Communicate, go ahead and blow the budget, and NEVER eat hours
Never eat time. If the budget is unrealistic then that is the job of the manager and partner to deal with. Focus on getting the work done. But do not spin your wheels if you are struggling. Ask your senior for assistance.
Never eat your time. Eating your time ultimately eats away company’s profit as the lack of visibility to actual hours would prompt others to book similar jobs at lower effort level. And at CRT it reduces your utilization
Never eat your time and communicate early to your senior if you think you will go over your budget and provide good reasons why you will go over/went over
I never eat time and go over budgets frequently
Never eat your time. Extra billing are a real thing and so are fee renegotiations.
Communicate, communicate, communicate. When your projects go out of budget, it's likely because something wasn't communicated early enough, and that's usually on the Staff/seniors. If something is caught early enough, we can likely get paid from the client if there's a good explanation for going over budget. If there's not, then you likely have some explaining to do. In short, if you are ever in a situation where you have to decide "eat hours or blow the budget", you probably screwed up weeks ago.
Never eat time
Eating your time is just extra calories.
When the budget is shit from the beginning and everyone knows it. You can communicate overages you want but when the entire team is expecting overages and expecting you to eat your time to reduce the overages, it has literally nothing to do with communication
Don’t do this in Tax. You screw people after you as we set unrealistic fees/budgets because of this. Communicate with higher ups as it’s happening. I get it’s hard as a first year so part of the seniors job is to manage that part as well
Going over budget is a good thing if you can charge out of scope fees to the client
Was forced to eat god knows how many hours (atleast 10 per week) based on our SM/PPD’s need to keep this key client happy on a 15 month project. Killed my utilization, was paid like crap, have since left lol
Don’t do it unless you really care about the project and see a future with the client without the budget stress
Fact is if you are in a position where you may be eating hours, you have usually failed to communicate timely. There are other exceptions obviously, but I would love to hear a situation where there was a possibility of eating hours that didn't involve a lack of communication by a staff/ senior.
All you want
PWC4 - if the budget it shit, then it’s even more imperative to not eat hours. If realization is low on the job for a couple of years, PPED’s will realize that they need to bump the fees or fire the client. Eating hours just perpetuates the problem
I was responding to EY1
PWC4 - Must suck to work with a bunch of passive wusses. Everyone I know as I grew up in the firm would talk to the client about being paid a fair fee. Usually those that don't want to have that conversation are the ones not serving the client well and developing a relationship to begin with.
It does suck