What is Public Accounting? – Master of Accounting Degrees

Public accounting encapsulates a number of important financial statement management services. Some of the most important financial statement management services conducted include auditing, tax record examination and financial statement preparation.

Public accountants can assist in the proactive preparation of tax consolidation plans that clients can use in order to ensure that their taxes are filed properly. Public accountants can assist clients by helping them plan their estates and accurately calculate their estimated income tax return amounts.

Regulations

Public companies are permitted to receive accounting services from firms that are registered with the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB). In the year 2002, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act strictly prohibited any public company from receiving audits from firms unregistered with the PCAOB.

Scale of Services

Contrary to private accounting, which is usually offered exclusively to a personal client on a one-on-one basis, this form of accounting is offered freely to clients that are being served without an exclusively committed arrangement. Public firms actively prepare, furnish and participate in the audits of their clients, helping them ensure that their financial records are in order so that they remain within compliance come tax season.

Some the most common businesses for public accountants to serve include service companies, manufacturers, nonprofits, retailers, manufacturers, and even government institutions. In addition to serving companies as a whole, a public accountants’ services can also be offered to individuals as well. Depending on what the exact needs of the job are, the specific nature of the services provided by public accountants can vary in scale accordingly.

Because there are naturally going to be differences between the exact natures of different clients’ and companies’ income tax return information, the scale of the service that a public firm will provide to them will be fine-tuned to match the context of the job.

Because the potential client pool of public accounting firms can be so vast, there is naturally a wide variety of different sizes and scales of public firms that accommodate all of these different clients. While some public firms can have personnel numbering up into the thousands, there are also a very small local firms that may only have less than a dozen public accountants on staff.

Whether there happens to be many different public accountants on board or only a few, the general hierarchy of a public firm is usually divided into the following tiers: partner, manager, senior and staff.

Public Accountant Career Development

Commonly, the most likely person to provide services as a public accountant is a CPA. CPAs may either work independently or be employed by a large, organized firm among colleagues with similar credentials.

It is very common for public accountants to gain several years of experience working with a public firm before leaving the company to begin their careers as employees with other businesses as private accountants. In addition to beginning careers as private accountants, another common path of advancement from the initial public post is also to look into working as either an internal accountant or a corporate accountant.