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Teams: “charge all your hours. Also make sure you’re cognizant of the budget.” Aka you gotta be a hungry hippo sometimes. Most people other than staff eat hours. Only difference is how big their reserve is
I’m in tax, and while we do tend to have large write offs on our compliance engagements, most of my headaches (and getting yelled at) arises because of audit teams on channel 1 engagements. Every year when audit teams try to cut budget, they think tax should be an appropriate place to start. They ask us to propose a budget, we do, and then they tell us it’s way too much. When we tell them what they’re countering with isn’t reasonable, they say it is (even though most audit managers and senior managers I’ve spoken to have no idea how tax works and legit don’t look at our workpapers until 2-3 days before filing), and then we still end up going over. Then they’re shocked we went over (and this doesn’t even include all the hours the team didn’t charge, which at some of the lower levels I think can be 20%). Tax partner hears it from audit team, who then asks senior manager, who then asks manager, and it just trickles down to the bottom. Tax teams are small and by the time the following year rolls around, half of the engagement team members have probably left the firm. Sometimes there are only one or two brand new staff on an account and they’ve never even seen a tax provision before. Some will pick it up, but most need at least twice the amount of time (and it’s still not in reviewable shape). It doesn’t help that we may only work on a client once a year if it’s private or four times if it’s public. The few friends I have left at the firm say their least favorite thing about the job, other than the crazy hours, is dealing with auditors. For all those audit teams out there, please do us a favor and try not to skimp tax teams on their budgets.
In EY assurance they schedule you for 55 hours a week during busy season. That just means that is the minimum you can expect to work. Depending on your client you may only work 55 hours, or it will likely be more than 55 for at least some weeks. If you are working less than 55 hours a week they will add another job to your schedule. You should be charging all of the hours you work, and never eating hours. That doesn’t do you, your team, and especially nexts years team any favors.
For what it’s worth, I understand the pressure to sometimes eat hours, but I’m a senior manager with the firm for 13 years and I have never eaten any hours and clearly communicate to my teams that they should never eat hours on my jobs (or any others). Best case, we bill the client for more money for the extra effort. Worst case, we take a write off (either justified or not), but at least we get a better sense for what a realistic budget should be.
Charge your hours and definitely set expectations at the beginning with your team on how long it should take to audit an area/perform a task. When you are getting close to that budget and not close to completing, raise it with your team and identify what is causing the issue and start tracking areas for out of scope. Track it while it’s still fresh in your mind rather than a few months down the road. This also helps identify what areas we may need to spend more time training if it’s recurring or have the discussion with client and how information, processes can be improved to make it efficient. I also tell teams it’s actual hours worked, including research, training new team members, reasonable breaks, etc. but not time sitting at your desk streaming and watching videos or online shopping for extended periods of time.
This s across pretty much all firms. Eating hours is a dumb concept that we all follow because everyone wants to promote and succeed and no one wants an ass chewing for going over budget. You get a little bit of leeway as a new staff because everyone knows you don’t know what you’re doing at first. But that does not necessarily mean they charged your extra hours back to the client. It means the firm writes off your excess time as a loss when they submit billing to the client. Which makes your own utilization not as good. So we eat time. And we accept that we’re just “paying our dues/grinding it out/being a dependable teammate.”
That’s the general crux of the issue.
That and you were recruited in the land of fairy tales where you get sign-on bonuses, were way overpaid as an intern for your motivation and skill level, and firm propaganda marketing crap (like iPads and gift cards and prizes and shirts and backpacks etc.) until you signed your formal offer letter as a salaried employee… and now you’re finding out too late what a hoax it is that “PA offers open-door policies, healthy corporate culture, work-life balance lol, and much better pay than all your graduating friends in other fields.”
I’ve seen teams being super intense about every hour charged, or teams that don’t care at all. It’s usually easy to figure out, you can tell your senior/manager that you charged 10 more hours than scheduled for one week, see if they start grilling you about where those overruns are from, or if they look at you like you are being weird for communicating a personal decision.
Fortunately my teams are usually the ones not really care about hours. We’ve only had a time where the partner did not believe us for saying a staff was extremely underperforming, and we had to pull his hours to show the partner that he was charging twice the time as the staff last year and his peers on the team. From our view, we knew the staff was struggling without seeing the hours, but sometimes partners were so far removed they only believe hours charged as evidence. But generally, managers should be responsible for budget overruns, and if they blame you, they are just bad at their jobs and time for you to move on from the team.
As a staff/senior I always eat my hours just because charging truthfully does not bring me benefit, but charging actual has a tiny chance of hurting me. If a manager/partner treats us well and asks us to charge actual, I’d do it, but that only happened once in my career
KPMG 5- to your point on retaliation, yes that is frequently what happens, and it is subtle. Rarely will a director or partner will come out and say they are unhappy with your time. Instead, you get rumors started in the management group about how inefficient, or careless, or clueless you are. This creates a reputation. Then, at some point, the retaliation takes its ultimate form- people won’t want to staff you on their jobs, which hurts your utilization much more than shaving a few hours off your time sheet here and there. From there, the downward spiral occurs.
And please, no whiny replies that “the firm has a strict non-retaliation policy…” Every company does, but it happens every day in subtle ways that cannot be proven.
Interesting thread. I've been the client who needed to reduce our audit fees so we greatly improved our worksheets, pre-audited our work and saw the 2 of the assigned auditors hunting for work on day 2 because they were assigned to us for the day.
Never saw a reduction in the fees charged. It's a 360degree circle.
Typically when clients provide cleaner work, it allows us to document with higher quality thus reducing time over the long term.