Accounting Job Roles

• Audit and risk -- verifying and checking company accounts and operating controls
• Corporate finance -- mergers, acquisitions and fundraising
• Tax and advisory -- helping clients minimise their tax liability

A wide variety of roles is available within the profession. Here are a few:

Audit manager

With your own portfolio of clients, you will direct your own team when executing an audit. This involves supervising and reviewing the team's work and being the principal point of contact with a client. You will also be reporting to a partner to discuss findings. This is a role that demands strong leadership and organisational skills as well as a commercial sensibility, including fee negotiation.

Corporate tax manager

This role is heavily tilted towards ensuring companies manage their affairs in a tax-effective manner. This is especially true of companies involved in a mergers and acquisitions scenario, including advising on executing the transaction in the most tax-efficient way. You may eventually specialise in a particular role here, for example, goods and services, VAT or property transactions. Regardless, you will be working with a very broad range of colleagues across several departments.

Transaction support manager

Transaction support managers focus on advising clients on the risks and uncertainties in a typical transaction. For example, a client may want to dispose of a business, so your job would be to report on how spinning out the sale would affect the company from a tax and financial perspective. This is a job with close ties to other colleagues and departments, particularly from the legal end.

Consulting roles

Within accounting, you may often advise a large global client on a variety of areas, be it human resources, offshore issues or technology. For example, a technology specialist may be hired to advise on how a company can exploit new digital technology or how it can more efficiently harness its own intellectual copyright issues.