audit associate

senior associate

associate

tax associate

manager

Grant Thornton

What is the best part of working at the company?
Opportunity to work with the best and most collaborative team environment. In addition, I gained multiple skill sets cutting across audit, financial reporting, tax, advisory, financial accounting, and data analytics enhanced through inter-departmental learning. Experience in auditing different industries such as fintech, banking & insurance, public sector, and health.

What is the most stressful part about working at the company?
Long working hours and tight fieldwork budget. During the dreaded busy season, it's no exaggeration that you can work very long hours during this time to ensure that the deadline is met. In most cases, one will not be allowed to take annual leave as work is continuous for a large chunk of the year in order to deliver client expectations. I, however, adapted to the work environment and organized my schedules in such as way that I would deliver at the workplace and create personal time.

What is the work environment and culture like at the company?
The work culture is most oriented towards delivering quality with much emphasis on professionalism over commercialism. The culture is rooted in integrity, trust, flexibility, and collaboration in order to deliver value. The work environment is fast-paced and a hybrid of traveling to client premises and as well as working from the office examining client files.

What is a typical day like for you at the company?
The typical day activities would vary depending on the time of the year and the stage of audit of a given client. At the beginning of a new client engagement, a typical day would involve: Arriving at the office/client site, reviewing the client's internal controls, policies, and procedures, and understanding the client's business model. I would then conduct substantive tests, inventory counts, and review working papers for other audit associates.

We all had a Tracker of which audits and teams we would be on for X amount of hours per day/total per week. We would typically commute to client site or the SF office by 8am since most of the seniors, managers, and partners are all in SF, and would work our assigned hours. I learned to use excel with no mouse and a ton of shortcuts and commands. I have audited both remotely and in person for Public and Corporations. However, hybrid started to not become an option, and a lot of client site/office visits would be a waste of time, basically deciding what to eat for lunch for 3-4 hours instead of doing work. Busy season was the hardest, working overtime and weekends, but it is a part of audit. GT kind of just throws you around teams and are expected to learn quickly on the spot. I enjoyed connecting with my starting class and having a wide range of age in coworkers gave me a different perspective on life and accounting/audit. Management and HR always did a great job with accommodating, and GT uses FTO instead of PTO, so you just need to hit your utilization % for the year, and the rest can be off time or another client for higher raise.

Please note that I write only from an administrative professional's standpoint.

Started out as a great place to work, great supervisor and good people to work with. Challenging, but fair and flexible.

A few years ago Grant Thornton started on a new "culture journey" and that sounded great--inclusion, positive thinking, and the like. Turns out it was all rhetoric, because since then the culture has gone downhill. HR is now called "People & Culture," a definite misnomer. 

National keeps making major changes with no regard to the effect they have on those who actually do the work at the ground level. I realize that this is a business, but I no longer feel like a valued member of a team, now I'm just a number on their books. 

Administrative professionals have been quitting left and right in the last few years; the company will not replace them, which leaves those of us still left scrambling to keep up. We've been told that partners are being pressured to get out and sell, while simultaneously being given more and more administrative work to track those sales, etc.

Yet recently one of our administrative positions was actually eliminated. We're told this all comes from national and not this office directly, and that they don't anticipate any more "rightsizing" (which is what they're calling it instead of downsizing), but the administrative management here didn't even see this coming. I no longer feel appreciated, or any job security here.

	Seniored multimillion-dollar manufacturing clients: Planned, executed and concluded audit, mentored and guided new associates and interns; completed audit on time and under budget
	Planed, managed and executed Fortune 500 and Fortune 100 companies including plans requiring 11-k filling 
	Performed SOX 404 top-down risk assessment to determine strength of internal controls and audit risk
	Executed testing for revenue, including cash, contracts, debt, capital assets, operating expenses, inventory and employee compensation
	Obtained an understanding of the clients’ businesses, reasons for unexplained or unexpected variances, and communicated findings with audit team and management to determine appropriate accounting treatment
	Assisted  team that made possible a $10MM debt offering to a multimillion dollar company by reviewing and assessing Private Equity and Clients financial statements 
	Initiated and arranged meetings with three prospective clients for the firm, compiled client background information for these meetings, and participated in preparation discussions with firm management
	Assisted the firm’s forensic practice with investigating a $1MM embezzlement and $500K insurance fraud 
	To obtained a better understanding of the process of bringing in new clients, assisted the New Client Investigation department perform background investigations on potential new clients and it’s executives

I would not recommend this place, especially the Rosslyn office. Management is too concerned with their own P/Ls to truly help anyone besides themselves or their immediate teams. Management is never around the office and rarely shows face. Trainings are joke, they never happen and when they do they are useless information. The partners charge time for time not worked then complain to you about overruns to the budget. Utilization is a useless metric that dictates your success and it is something you have absolutely control over. The partners on engagements want you eat hours to make the clients happy but then complain about you not charging enough hours. They are so far from the big 4 its comical in terms of learning and development, prestige, talent and resources. If you want a job were you are expected to teach yourself everything and not have a champion to help you develop, then by all means go here.

Oh and the unlimited vacation policy is an absolute joke. You have to fill out this ridiculous form that completely discourages people from taking vacation. The vacation has been approved so far in advance and management pressures you not to take any time off because of the impact to your utilization.

Everything looks good on the outside: well manicured corporate image, professional and intelligent colleagues, growth oriented and entrepreneurial business model. But on the inside, its riddled with rot and decay. My two years I saw a lot changes both from an organizational stand-point as well as employee turnover. GT was constantly trying to figure out what they were and what they wanted to do and would go through heavy lengths to rename, reorg and qualify their position to clients.  They touted their Russell-2000 clientele stronghold but desperately wanted to be in the F500 ranks of other well established consultancies. If they got in the door at said aforementioned clients it was menial, arduous work at best to help establish a long-term relationship. Management was so sale-centric that often times they would be pitching the next thing while the ship was currently going down on their current project, no life raft in sight. I felt as if it was a "sit down and shut-up" environment should you raise any concerns with project dynamics or even mentoring and career growth for that matter.  

They emphasize training. However, none of the trainings I have taken part in reflect working with real clients. I would say 90% of what I was taught was not applicable. As such, I felt very under prepared. My reviews almost always were along the lines of "needs to take initiative to solve problems alone," but "needs to ask questions sooner." My office tries to feel inclusive, but always has a fake vibe to it. They say they care, but in reality, they really don't. I usually was only scheduled with one manager with whom I didn't get along because communication styles differed. As a result, my performance reviews suffered. I like to know the "why" of what I am doing, but everybody around me only cared that the work got done, no matter if it may or may not be done correctly. My worked was constantly changed and I couldn't answer questions when asked about it from partner. I have seen this job as a stepping stone to get "public accounting" experience and move to private. It wasn't that I couldn't tolerate the 60 hour weeks, it was the the manager who I was always scheduled with. I spoke to resource manager and schedules were pretty set in stone, even 6 months in advance. The only thing that kept me here this long was the pay and to try and gain public accounting experience.

At Grant Thornton, I was an audit and assurance associate for nearly two years, and two full busy seasons.  I worked on a range of different types of audits, reviews, and compilations for several key industries in the Wisconsin region.

Beginning in my second year at Grant, I started to serve as the 'in-charge' accountant for various benefit plan and audit engagements.  As the in-charge, I was responsible for the engagement timing, audit documentation, peer review, as well as the financial statement preparation in accordance with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP).

The most difficult part of the job was managing several engagements concurrently, however my hard work and determination provided me the platform in which I was able to provide deliverables in a timely manner.  

I worked on engagements in numerous types of industries such as governmental, manufacturing, insurance, wholesaler, real estate, IT, as well as the non-for-profit sector.

I worked on three separate assurance engagements. One engagement was a full year end audit engagement of a private company to provide assurance to major creditors and equity shareholders due to material changes in the company’s financial structure where I assisted in analyzing, tracing, and vouching several sections of the company’s financial statements. Next, I worked on an engagement where we performed a quarterly review of a public company in accordance with SEC regulations where I performed analytical procedures, primarily by reviewing all financial statements to compare quarterly interim financial information with comparable information in the immediately preceding interim period and year-to-date interim financial information with the corresponding periods in previous years. Finally, I was in charge of performing analytical procedures related to the cash section of an engagement to audit the fiscal year-end financial statements of a public company in accordance with SEC regulations. I also assisted in various benefit plan engagements when I was not specifically assigned to a client site engagement.

Grant Thornton is a professional work environment with a commitment to corporate culture. Work / Life balance is a high priority and those who work at Grant Thornton pride themselves in delivering the highest quality work. A typical day consists of developing marketing strategies for our top tier clients, recognizing business development opportunities and delivering high quality marketing materials. Management believes in a strong mentor-ship philosophy and employee retention is a form of success. Everyday I learn more about our customers' buying habits and create ways to enhance our growth strategy based on those trends. The hardest part of my job is creating a pace that my team can keep up with on a consistent basis. The most enjoyable part of my job is knowing that we are generating revenue year over year and exceeding our business plan goals.

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Audit associate 4 salaries reported	$77,250 per year
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