associate

audit associate

senior associate

tax associate

intern

CliftonLarsonAllen

CLA treats people too much like numbers. They don't seem to care much about a contract consultant's financial, emotional, and career needs.

They only hire consultants on a contract basis meaning you only get paid when under contract with clients. No salary or bench time pay.

Their pay was bad for non-salaried contract consulting positions at a consulting firm. Even more so when they struggle to keep their consultants busy.

They might tell you that they will find work quickly for both new hire consultants and consultants coming off contract. Not necessarily true. A consultant can be out of work with no pay for several weeks or months.

New hire benefits and pay don't start when they hire consultants. Benefits and pay start after they find you your first billable contract job. 

I had set up employee benefits for a client shortly before starting for CLA, and CLA benefits seemed expensive for what you got. It seemed like CLA was charging  $200-$300 per month over what the benefits should cost CLA. Maybe because of internal administration costs. 

Also, benefits can drop, and eventually disappear over time, if they can't keep you busy enough.

Additionally, I noticed they may bypass new hires by giving existing consultants the available jobs first, even if the new hire consultant has been waiting longer and is a better fit for the job. They might do this because CLA is paying for the existing consultant's benefits while they are inbetween contract jobs. They should give the client the best resources they have available, not just resources they want to keep billing due to resource costs.

CLA requires their new consultants to commit to CLA, and to not look for work with other companies, even when they are not paying them. But CLA does not commit to their consultants.

Due to the above business model potentially hurting recruiting quality, it makes sense that a lot of their accounting and management consultants were not that knowledgable or good at their client assignments. 

Their internal salaried office, non-consulting, people were generally pretty nice, but office management was not great. Neither was client account managment (sales) and new engagement support. For instance, I was hired by a client and background checks were in process. It was about 1.5 weeks before my start date, so I checked with the office people on status. The person I talked to was rude and said they had it covered and that I did not need to followup. Then like two working days before my start date, I had not heard anything, which is very weird. So I sent an email. A higher up person said he would check, then later responded that they checked with the client and the client decided to cancel the contract. Very suspicious. It's unlikely a client is going to cancel a new contract and not tell CLA. And why wasn't the account mgr and office staff communicating with the client? Why wasn't I notified about the cancellation more timely? Did the client not hear anything thing from CLA so decided to go with someone else? Very bad CLA service to the client and the consultants. It ended up costing me a lot of income.

Their leadership and management at an office and corporate level was not good. I have seen them provide under qualified people to clients, and loose clients from bad management and bad account management. I have seen them cut corners on client work to just get through things quicker and to make more money, causing quality issues. The office and company just seemed very poorly managed. Also, their mandatory paid online learning courses sounded good, except the classes would have paid time limits that might be way too low to take the courses, especially if you did not pass the test the first time and had to do it all over again.

One of the potential problems is they have too much of an accounting mentality vs. a management / consulting / marketing / strategic / customer / competition mindset.  Accountants are specialists and do not generally have a great understanding of business management, marketing and leadership holistically. Accountants play an important business support role, but tend to lack the general business and management education and experience. This can cause them to struggle to understand the business big picture and the very diverse business, operational, marketing, customer service, management, etc. aspects of businesses.

CLA seems to have a preferences towards accounting consultants over management consultants. There was a noticable amount of accounting people doing non-accounting management / management consulting roles, and not doing them well, making it tougher for management consultants to find work. This is not in the best interest of their clients either. Generally, accounting consultants should do the more accounting related work and professional managers / management consultants should do the business and initiative management work. 

CLA just seems to frequently assign the wrong people to conduct work / jobs at the associate and consulting level, as well as at the management, principle, and leadership level.

Typical accounting services and management by the numbers are probably where CLA is more comfortable, while complex business, management, leadership, marketing, strategy, and management consulting expertise seems to be a weakness. Also, none of their senior executives have education and focused early career experiences in non-accounting business areas,  according to their website, as they are all from finance / accounting backgrounds. No wonder me and many other people had bad experiences working for CLA. A severe lack of education and business background diversity. It also explains why they tend to manage people like numbers.

I think they could possibly improve and become better managed by becoming more diverse and putting more business / management / operations / marketing / non-accounting background people into management, leadership, and executive positions. For instance, putting accounting people in charge of IT, major accounts management, HR, or office operations is probably not the best idea. Let the proven professional IT managers, sales / marketing / account managers, and business / operations managers manage and lead where their expertise applies, and let accountants do their business support accounting work. CLA is a business that needs better business managers and leaders, and the best hands on business leaders and managers are generally not people from accounting backgrounds.

But not a place to stay. This company requires you to work 45 hours a week or 9 hours a day. 7 hours of your day needs to be billable to make your 1700 hour yearly budget.  You end up working 50 -60 hours a week to make your billable hours. There is very little to no contact with the clients of the work you complete and that, alone, makes you feel like a robot. With that disconnect it makes you feel as if what you do isn’t important. Your not allowed to go on vacation or have a promotion unless you can maintain billable hours.  
Management says that they have your back but the only people they really support are the clients, management, principals and in-charges.  This place is very impersonal and HR here is a joke. Don’t ever expect them to ever respond to your needs. If you need an employment verification you have to request access and a key to an employment verification site. If you need software assistance management sends you a video or a link to a website you teach your self. Orientation is taped and if you need to review anything HR refers you to their website. You need to be certified on every piece of software you use. You need to be certified before you have the chance to work on the software. In short if you work here you have to teach yourself what to do, tech yourself about the company, teach your self client work and you work on your own with no support and no personal training. You do the same work as senior accountant, accountant, and analyst . There is no separation of duties.

Great price to start your career and get experience in the accounting field but this place is definitely not a place to stay or retire.

This place is so poorly mismanaged it's hard to believe they get paid to assist clients. 

1. They treat employees like commodities, you are known by utilization %, rate per hour, charge hour progress and new business growth. 
2. The communication between principals (that is what they call partners) is poor at best. It is even worse between principals and staff. 
3. They call themselves "the career building firm" but rarely do principals mentor staff or assist in career building goals. I did not have one conversation about my career growth despite numerous direct requests to my career coach. I followed up with HR person and evidently ticked off my coach and was given cold shoulder until I quit. Found out about last salary adjustment by looking at employee portal. Principals didn't even bother to talk to me.
4. Pay raises do not reflect current market nor production.  Starting point is how little can we by with to prevent you from leaving.
5. Training is 80% cross selling related and 10% technical.
6. Principals do not include staff in client meetings.
7. Principals prefer not to talk to staff until after 5:00 so not to interfere with phone calls and their doors are usually shut.
8. Principals regularly sit on work for months then try to get out door at last minute requiring last minute long nights and weekends.
9. We were supposed to get salary adjustments reflecting new business. Never happened. A 2% raise was considered fantastic.
10. There are principals that are supposed to be generating new business and bring in absolutely squat. 

I would look somewhere else if looking at a manager or above position.

I have worked for three different office locations for this company. I started out in one of their small town offices of about 5 other people. It didn't go anywhere so I was hired by another office in a different city, it was a fabulous office to work for. Everyone was awesome. Then I moved and ended up getting a position with one of the larger offices. It was horrible. I met a few great coworkers but management was the worst I've ever witnessed let alone worked under. The office manager is like David Brent of The Office on acid. She is the worst ocd micro-manager I have ever had the displeasure of working for. Instead of trusting her staff to get their work done in a timely manner she would interrupt them every 10-20 minutes to see where they were at which disrupts productivity and employee moral. 
The managing principle of this office is disrespectful and demeaning to the other partners as well as staff. They barely pay you enough to survive so you better hope that during tax season you get all the hours you can just to save up some money. There are several things wrong with management that I would honestly run out of characters before I could finish. I highly suggest that corporate send in someone undercover and see what it's really like.

I worked there for a bit over 1.5 years and had one promotion which feels reasonable. In that time, however, I was only given real feedback once and it was never brought up again. When I first started there were plenty of training opportunities and people to answer questions but when I was given new responsibilities later on (that I'd need training on as a recent grad where this was my first job in the industry), there was minimal support and questions were met with annoyance. When it comes to disability accommodations it was frustrating to say the least. I was verbally cornered into disclosing mine after working there for a year and while they did go through the process of letting me apply for accommodations, the process took two months because they outsource to an external company for that and once the accommodations were approved they waited three months exactly before firing me. They did not give real reasons as to why they were firing me and it felt as though they were simply waiting until enough time had passed where it would be difficult for me to prove that it was retaliation.

•	Coordinate tradeshows from start to finish through completing any required registration paperwork for the participants attendance, organizing check requests and payments, scheduling annual tradeshow conferences within the Financial Institutions calendar, registering booth space, ordering marketing supplies and giveaways, reserving and managing the tradeshow banners, and preparing collateral with any specialty material items for the attendees.
•	Schedule social toaster posts for different sectors of the business while pulling information from CLA’s twitter account.
•	Work directly with the client in a professional manner to complete the paperwork and organize payment for sponsorships, registrations, etc. before deadlines are due.
•	Complete, add or update any sponsorships and events in the Business Development calendar.
•	Organize roundtable meetings by keeping track of all RSVP’s, ordering food, coordinating any giveaways and responding accordingly to the attendees. 
•	Started a new role as a Marketing CSA.
•	Coordinated all Learn Live trainings by scheduling the conference rooms, organizing food deliveries, emailing attendees, distributing materials and retaining the signature sheets to ensure CPE credit is issued.

Working at CLA is all about what you want to achieve. All they ask in return is your commitment to dependability, teamwork, and focusing on your job when you are actually on the job. If you prefer not to work when you are getting paid to work, please stay away. If you desire to join a team that cares about you and make a difference with the work you do, please apply. 

During my 2 decades with CLA, I observed many people who took advantage of the flexible work arrangements, including myself. Choosing to work part-time for several years while your children are young will not prevent you from becoming a principal if that is your goal. It may take some time to find the team/supervisor that fits your personality, but once you do they will remain loyal to you and help in any way possible. 

Yes, some offices have culture issues. The hours can be demanding at certain times of the year. Local management needs to do a better job of cutting losses early when new staff clearly lack the skills for the position, choose not to work, or flat-out lie to your face.

Still, I would recommend CLA as a great place to start, or stay. The enormous opportunities they have in all types of industries across the country allow you to choose your own adventure. I have no regrets about my time at CLA. 

My decade-long journey at CLA has been a rollercoaster. In the first eight years, it was a place of camaraderie and shared values, fostering a sense of support and excellence. However, the last two years witnessed a sharp decline in leadership quality. The organization shifted its focus towards the bottom line, neglecting employee well-being and growth. The scheduling app was a disaster and treated people like commodities. Instead of taking ownership of a failed design, they expected everyone else to work more hours to make up the Firm's deficit. There are a handful of bad leaders with power and no one is willing to speak up and challenge them because they have been threatened that their comp will be impacted. 

This shift has resulted in a toxic environment where employees fear challenging leaders more interested in financial goals than nurturing talent. Creativity, collaboration, and open communication have been stifled, giving way to a culture of compliance and silence.

The transformation of CLA from a company that valued its employees to one treating them as commodities for profit is disheartening. I hope CLA can rediscover its original ethos and return to a place where employees are valued and empowered

Management at CLA is very hit or miss, depending on your office location. My specific location is an extreme miss. The pay is decent enough for me to put-up with the mediocre training, communication, and lack of general support. The training that CLA offers is outdated videos with learning modules, and review points. If you don't learn from either source, your job will be at risk. I was almost put onto a PIP because I was under the assumption that I was going to have hands-on-training with  someone with more seniority. That wasn't the case, luckily I had prior experience as an tax intern at a different firm and I was able to learn through SALY, but if you struggle with that too then your job will be at risk. Management offers little support in terms of training, and your expected to learn by asking others, and picking up the pieces by yourself. The culture at CLA is okay, but if your an introvert you will definitely feel alienated. I have also worked with some reviewers that decided to complain about my work to management instead of communicating to me about the habitual mistakes I made, which was backstabby and wasnt very "CLA family". 

Where to start, my mind takes me to management, the decisions that are made by these people are not best practice, it's WORST practice. They hold small companies ransom, by constantly over billing them. If they had a dissagreement with the billing, the would quite literally hold everthing from them, the companies clients, and the bill wasn't even late. For their larger clients, especially during tax season I worked 7 days a week, there was no work-life balance, and the pay isn't competitive. If you are looking for a new accounting job, or job in this line of work, I would highly advise to look elsewhere, only work at CLA if it's your last resort or if it's for a short time to hold you over until you get a job at a real company. There are some really nice people that work there (that isn't management), some that continue to work there for some god awful reason I'll never understand, maybe they love pain or secretly enjoy that level of coperate delusion and illusion. I would rather put toothpicks under my nails and force my hand into the wall as hard as possible before considering to work at this place again... and I don't care to discuss this anymore.

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Associate 6 salaries reported	$74,333 per year
Audit associate 3 salaries reported	$73,667 per year
Senior associate 7 salaries reported	$88,500 per year
Tax associate 21 salaries reported	$68,385 per year
Intern 3 salaries reported	$30.00 per hour

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