Day 1: “Looking” for Work October 8, 2006
Posted by audit in On the Job.trackback
One of the strangest things about being the lowest person on the totem is that you have zero control over your schedule. So, for those times where you are not scheduled to be on a client, you are supposed to “look for work”, which entails circling the office, asking harried managers for work. The problem with that is that managers know that in our inexperienced state we are incapable of doing anything but the simplest of tasks for them. In fact, most of the time, I have been told they would rather do the work themselves than have to explain how to do it, answer all the questions and then check and correct the work. My suggestion: contact your scheduler, tell them to book you on as many engagements as possible. This will increase your billable hours and make you look like much more of a superstar than the 20 minute filing jobs one can find hanging around the office.
Careful there, you’re not a manager yet. There’s a difference between chargeable and billable hours.
Enjoy the slack time before you’re put on real jobs – before you know it you’ll have more work than what you know what to do with. Your utilization rate will correspondigly sky-rocket.
That’s interesting Krupo – I’d never considered the difference between chargeable and billable. I’d assumed billable was what lawyers say and chargeable is what accountants say.
Neither did I. Could you elaborate please?
I would assume that billable hours are charged to the client…while chargeable hours are billable to the audit firm. At my firm billable hours are king…chargeable hours are looked at if you miss your billable hours quota for the year…but they do not carry as much weight. I’ve been told that I better be improving billable hour productivity (by creating a new workpaper template or some such thing) in order for my chargeable hours to be worth anything in the eyes of the partners.
It took forever, but my elaboration is complete.
http://krupo.ca/archive/2006/10/12/hours.aspx
Detoured Economist had the right idea, but I went to town on it.
I probably could’ve written with some more nuance about how it’s done in various firms, but you’re all welcome to fire in comments with your own specific differences.
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wow accounting sucks! change fields!
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