just wondering in regards to PwC, what's the difference between Private Clients vs Audit/Tax, is it just that Private Clients deals one-on-one with people and involves Audit/Tax services or is it advisory/consulting in some shape or form?
Audit - You go out to different clients (how long you spend at a single client can range from a few days to a few months) and do tests on their financial statements, stocktakes (someone in audit can probably elaborate more)
Tax - A lot of compliance work with large corporate clients, like tax returns, activity statements. There are a few divisions in tax though, so you can do quite specialised work eg. transfer pricing, and at a higher level there will be more advisory/consulting work
Private Clients - There are 3 divisions within private clients:
- Audit & Assurance (A&A) does much of the same work as the mainstream assurance division but with private companies
- Private Financial Services (PFS) works with the high net worth individuals (CEOs, celebrities etc.) doing things like estate planning, wealth management & tax returns, so there's a lot of consulting involved at higher levels
- Business Taxation Services (BTS) works with a lot of smaller companies, and some large ones that are just not publicly listed. There's a wide variety of things involved - management accounting (preparing financial statements and other accounts), tax compliance, tax consulting, and also some 'outsourced CFO' roles
Given which one I know the most about, I guess its fairly obvious what I do. But remember, its okay not to know which one you want to be in at the moment - when I did my interviews I applied for different divisions for different firms, and even during the interview and after I got my offers, I was still asking questions to find out more about each division!