PAY & COMPENSATION

Are You Earning What You Deserve?

By

young woman seated at laptop counting money

Plus some predictions about where the job market is headed.

By CPA Trendlines Research

Here’s a statistic you can probably sympathize with. According to new salary data, 99 percent of finance professionals report experiencing some level of burnout in the past year.

RESEARCH: Partners: Your Middle Managers Are Getting Burnout

MORE: The Slow, Painful Death of the 150-Hour Rule | Partner Comp Earnings Gap: What’s the Right Spread? | Main Street Accountants See Turbulence Ahead for Small Business | Partners: Your Middle Managers Are Getting Squeezed | Gear Up For Growth |
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Unless you’re in that other 1 percent, you know how it feels. And who could blame you for feeling that feeling and then looking at your paycheck?

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Partner Comp Earnings Gap: What’s the Right Spread?

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people standing on stacks of coins, representing income gaps

How do you get it right at your firm?

By Kristen Rampe
Partner Comp: Art & Science

There are many reasons for a sizeable spread in partner income at a CPA firm. For example, at a firm with both a founder nearing retirement and a first-year partner, the spread would be wide. Some firms are the opposite, with two to four founding partners agreeing to share all profits equally. There is no spread there.

MORE ON PARTNERS: Thirteen Traits of Partners You’ll Want to Keep | Six Rules for Keeping Partners Happy and Productive | Five Keys in Compensating New Managing Partners | Top 20 Tough Choices for the Partner Comp Committee | Voting on Ownership Basis? Three Better Methods | What Partners Do and Don’t Deserve | Tell Potentials What Partnership Takes | Five Steps to Transition to Partnership
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For most multipartner and multigeneration accounting firms, the situation gets more complicated. You’ll have some high performers and some who are on cruise control. You’ll have ones contributing notably more dollars to the bottom line and more to future leaders’ development.

But what about two partners who contribute relatively the same? Should their income allocation be similar? How similar?
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Three Ways to Thrive with Limited Capacity

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smiling man working at laptop in office with glass walls

Turn the staffing shortage into a new opportunity.

By Frank Stiteley
The Relentless CPA

Charles Dickens had to be writing about the accounting profession when he wrote, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

Clients are plentiful. I met a new client coming out of the restroom at our office complex. We get four to five inquiries a day – out of tax season. During tax season, we turned down four out of five prospective clients.

MORE ON STAFFING: Tax and Accounting Jobs and Salaries Show Strength | Olympics of Outsourcing and Offshoring for Accountants | New Study: Strong and Steady Growth for Accountant Jobs and Salaries | Can’t Recruit? Retain! | Is Tech Causing Both CPA Shortage and Low Salaries? | Staffing Tops List of Woes at CPA Firms | To Replenish the Talent Pipeline, Go Back to the Classroom | Whole Person Retention: When It’s Not Just the Money | More Big Firms Shut Their Doors to New College Grads | Seven Enticements to Keep Talent On Board | Employee Retention Is Easier Than Attraction | Let Interns Fix the Staffing Shortage? | Disruptors: Talent Crisis? What Talent Crisis? | Firms Culling Clients as Staffing Woes Persist
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Staff are not plentiful – at least not good ones. I’m getting two or three resumes a day, but they’re the warm body sort most of us learned the hard way not to hire during the pandemic. You’ve seen these resumes too. They are people with six employers in eight years. You are certain to be number seven in nine years. They claim eight years of experience, but you can see from their job history that it’s really two years of experience repeated four times. And – they want $100K for those two years of real experience.

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Tax and Accounting Jobs and Salaries Show Strength

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line chart
Overall accounting profession employment hits a glitch.

Hourly earnings fluctuate.

By Beth Bellor
CPA Trendlines Research

Despite a slowing increase in employment for the U.S. economy in general, the nation’s tax and accounting sector is improving on most fronts, marking more than four years of solid year-over-year gains.

MORE: New Study: Strong and Steady Growth for Accountant Jobs and Salaries | More Big Firms Shut Their Doors to New College Grads | Seven Enticements to Keep Talent On Board | Payroll Leads Job Gains in Tax & Accounting Sector
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To be sure, tax and accounting employment nudged slightly down in July, according to the latest data available to CPA Trendlines Research. But it remains ahead of last year’s figures. And record highs are popping in key hiring segments, including staff, CPA firms and payroll services. Is talk of staffing shortages overblown, or would growth be even stronger if more qualified candidates were available? READ MORE →