Deputy Accountancy Manager Review

In my current role I deal with 150 clients as my own client base, plus closures, supporting the team. I have spent a lot of time recently training more junior staff and picking up a lot of complaints and leavers. I am also responsible for payroll uploading and accessing previous versions of our softwares.

I am consistently developing existing skills including my maths and english, I have developed new areas of knowledge with studying and the work that I am currently completing and getting to deal with a lot of different clients to ensure the service expectations are being met, this has helped with my customer service skills.

I do enjoy the programme when I have the opportunity to learn new areas of the business and of the syllabus and it has been eye opening and interested to venture into newer areas which are not covered in my current job including inheritance tax and audits which I would not have been given exposure to in my current role.

The programme itself from ACCA is structured and I am aware of the exam sittings and the frequency, however I have found the tuition frequency given by Paragon is not considerate of the workload within the current job role and is often unachievable and puts additional pressure on me to maintain and work balance along with personal life and studying.

Support from the employer could be better, just on the basis that the work load can be quite demanding especially around deadline days and sometimes extra time is required in work to avoid penalties for clients and therefore it is difficult to manage. Time out of the working day is given for tuition and a day off for exams.

I do have access to a personal tutor and the tutors who complete the tuition lessons for us are able to be contacted around the area of studying, however requests have been made previously around the way tuition is scheduled and when this is completed and these have been ignored or not accommodated.

The qualification has broadened my knowledge into areas that whilst these are not offerred as part of a service have enabled me to provide the client with a basic advice and where they would need to look in order to obtain and full answer or to advise them of what type of accountant they would need to look for to help them get the answer.

None at the moment, engagement activities have been significantly impacted by covid as most newer staff and even existing staff are now on home working contracts or hybrid contracts, newer people live further away from offices so travelling would be unreasonable for them which makes it harder to organise events to suit everyone. Sometimes these are done by office you are based in which again is not always possible.

Yes

SJD Accountancy is good company to start off your accountancy career in, it can be difficult to come in at a higher level as it is fast paced and can be difficult to learn on the job and pick up on all of the processes before taking on your client base which most tend to struggle with.

Do research on the business before attending the interview to see what they do as a business, what new things they are branching out into and what the values are like, this will give you a good feel for how the business works and what is important to the business overall.