STAFFING & RECRUITING

Tax and Accounting Pay Advancing at 5.9% Pace

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Payroll services hours take some wild swings.

By Beth Bellor

What would help recruit more people to the accounting profession? How about that trusty standby, more money?

Most accountants are bringing home more in hourly earnings, according to the latest available data.

MORE on JOBS: What an A.I.-Powered Workforce Means for Accountants | New Businesses Mean New Business | Accounting Jobs Up 4% for Year |

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For the accounting profession overall, hourly earnings hit a new high at $41.39, up 35 cents or 0.9 percent for the month and $2.32 or 5.9 percent for the year. Staff earnings hit a new top mark at $31.76, up 20 cents or 0.6 percent for the month and $1.64 or 5.4 percent for the year.
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The Disruptors: Al Anderson on The New Manifesto for Accountants

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Change your firm or go extinct.

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The Disruptors
With Liz Farr

Al Anderson has been trying to change audit for nearly his entire career and has always been “willing to try things differently.” While he’s always loved auditing – and thinks to this day that auditing can be fun – what he didn’t love was “auditing by doing it the same way every year.” However, he sees far too many firms performing audits the same way they have for decades. Anderson believes that “the firms that are unwilling to change eventually are going to be history.”

INSTANT DOWNLOAD: Al Anderson’s “The New Manifesto for Accountants.“

MORE PODCASTS and VIDEOS:  Peter Margaritis: The Power Skills Every Accountant Needs | Joe Montgomery: Find the Sweet Spot of the Right Clients, Right Services and Right Prices | Marie Green: Your Bad Apples Are Ruining You | Megan Genest Tarnow: Hire for Curiosity Rather Than Compliance | Clayton Oates: One Way to Keep Clients for Life | Randy Crabtree: Follow These Three Rules to Keep Employees Happy | Erik Solbakken: Yes, You Can Work Less and Make More | Donny Shimamoto: Future Firm Growth Requires a Mindshift | Jennifer Wilson: Empower Young Workers to Build the Firm Everyone Loves | Mike Whitmire: Re-Think Your Hiring and Training Practices | Hector Garcia: Success Strategies of a Quickbooks YouTube Superstar | Blake Oliver: Why Tax Work Yearns To Be Free| Private Equity Explodes in U.K. | Brannon Poe: The Status Quo Must Go  | Accounting Nerds, Unlock Your Super Powers  | Disruptor: Jason Statts Shakes Up the Status Quo | Think Small to Think Big with Matt Wilkinson | When Financial Statements Go Extinct with Corey Schmidt | Can Geraldine Carter Save Accountants from Themselves? | Re-Inventing Accounting with Tyler Anderson

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In an effort to combat the rising tide of commoditization of audit and assurance services, Anderson has been teaching a revolutionary framework for audit leadership to auditors around the world and has now written a book (to be released later this year by CPA Trendlines) that describes the five attributes of this framework.

These five attributes include:

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Scott Scarano: First, Grow People. Then Firm Growth Can Follow

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We need the machines to do as much of this as we can.

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The Disruptors
With Liz Farr

When Scott Scarano lost a few good people at his firm, he had an epiphany that he needed to change things. Instead of continuing to grow for the sake of growth, he overhauled his management approach.

MORE PODCASTS and VIDEOS:  Peter Margaritis: The Power Skills Every Accountant Needs | Joe Montgomery: Find the Sweet Spot of the Right Clients, Right Services and Right Prices | Marie Green: Your Bad Apples Are Ruining You | Megan Genest Tarnow: Hire for Curiosity Rather Than Compliance | Clayton Oates: One Way to Keep Clients for Life | Randy Crabtree: Follow These Three Rules to Keep Employees Happy | Erik Solbakken: Yes, You Can Work Less and Make More | Donny Shimamoto: Future Firm Growth Requires a Mindshift | Jennifer Wilson: Empower Young Workers to Build the Firm Everyone Loves | Mike Whitmire: Re-Think Your Hiring and Training Practices | Hector Garcia: Success Strategies of a Quickbooks YouTube Superstar | Blake Oliver: Why Tax Work Yearns To Be Free| Private Equity Explodes in U.K. | Brannon Poe: The Status Quo Must Go  | Accounting Nerds, Unlock Your Super Powers  | Disruptor: Jason Statts Shakes Up the Status Quo | Think Small to Think Big with Matt Wilkinson | When Financial Statements Go Extinct with Corey Schmidt | Can Geraldine Carter Save Accountants from Themselves? | Re-Inventing Accounting with Tyler Anderson

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“And things are better now at the firm, because we’re not focused on growth,” but instead on “growing everybody,” including himself, Scarano said. By building better habits and finding better ways to do things, his team is growing its bottom line, and a few of the people who left earlier have now returned. “That’s the growth I like to see.” READ MORE →

New AICPA Program Aims to Open Personnel Pipeline

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Young businesswoman talking to her client and using tabletFirms are being contacted to participate.

By CPA Trendlines Research

As the leaders of CPA firms know quite well, the pipeline of incoming professionals has slowed to somewhere between a trickle and a drip.

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The causes are many:

  • The cost of higher education
  • Misconceptions about the profession
  • The difficulty of the CPA exam
  • Competition from other professions
  • Competition from corporations needing accountants

But not to worry! The American of Institute of CPAs is on the case!
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Peter Margaritis: The Power Skills Every Accountant Needs

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Your EQ is just as important as your IQ. And seven more take-aways.

^ Unmute for sound and adjust the volume
Subscribe to CPA Trendlines podcasts anywhere: Apple, Google, Spotify, iHeart, Deezer, Amazon Music and Audible, Player FM, Audacy, Gaana (India), and Boomplay (Africa).

The Disruptors
With Liz Farr for CPA Trendlines

Peter Margaritis, who also calls himself The Accidental Accountant, grew up in the gregarious environment of restaurants, “where everybody communicated, not well, sometimes, but they communicated.” So it was a shock when he went to work at Price Waterhouse, and he “felt that all the air got sucked out of the office, and nobody was communicating at all, and they looked at me like I was crazy.”

MORE: Joe Montgomery: Find the Sweet Spot of the Right Clients, Right Services and Right Prices | Marie Green: Your Bad Apples Are Ruining You | Megan Genest Tarnow: Hire for Curiosity Rather Than Compliance | Clayton Oates: One Way to Keep Clients for Life | Randy Crabtree: Follow These Three Rules to Keep Employees Happy | Erik Solbakken: Yes, You Can Work Less and Make More | Donny Shimamoto: Future Firm Growth Requires a Mindshift | Jennifer Wilson: Empower Young Workers to Build the Firm Everyone Loves | Mike Whitmire: Re-Think Your Hiring and Training Practices | Hector Garcia: Success Strategies of a Quickbooks YouTube Superstar | Blake Oliver: Why Tax Work Yearns To Be Free| Private Equity Explodes in U.K. | Brannon Poe: The Status Quo Must Go  | Accounting Nerds, Unlock Your Super Powers  | Disruptor: Jason Statts Shakes Up the Status Quo | Think Small to Think Big with Matt Wilkinson | When Financial Statements Go Extinct with Corey Schmidt | Can Geraldine Carter Save Accountants from Themselves? | Re-Inventing Accounting with Tyler Anderson

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His crusade for the last decade or so has been to help accountants improve what we often call soft skills, but which he calls power skills: the ability to communicate clearly and effectively with others. “There’s nothing that will slow you down more in your career than a poorly written memo or email or a presentation that you were poorly prepared for,” Margaritis said.
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Can Better Tech Attract Personnel?

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Six ways work becomes more engaging with the right tools.

By CPA Trendlines Research

One of the accounting industry’s most persistent and worsening problems is the difficulty in hiring and retaining professionals. According to the CPA Trendlines Business Barometer, 48 percent cite staffing as a critically problematic issue.

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The pipeline is part of the problem. The supply of graduates with majors in accountancy has been dropping since 2015.

Accounting firms can’t do much about the dwindling supply of professionals, but they can take action to attract those who are new to the trade.
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Accounting Jobs Up 4% for Year

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Payroll services up over 7 percent.

By Beth Bellor
CPA Trendlines Research

Employment in the accounting profession continues to climb, according to the most recent federal jobs data. New highs were set in

  • employment overall and for staff, CPA firm staff, payroll, payroll staff, bookkeeping and women
  • earnings overall and for staff, and for payroll staff

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Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 339,000 in May, with the unemployment rate ticking up by 0.3 percentage point to 3.7 percent. The professional and business services sector added 64,000 jobs, similar to April.
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