Businesses are looking for competent number-crunchers. Some are even desperate to find talent. But the next wave of finance professionals is in short demand. And the reason is pretty simple …
… accountants are being paid too little to meet the growing demand. A new report, Accounting Talent Solutions, from the National Pipeline Advisory Group (NPAG), surveyed 7,000-plus business and finance professionals to assess the reasons behind today’s certified public accountant (CPA) shortage and the precipitous drop in students sitting for the CPA exam. (A related result: errors in accounting are spiking.) The American Institute of CPAs founded the NPGA last year to improve both problems.
Result: 84% of business professionals and 85% of students say companies don’t pay accountants enough to draw talent to the field. Accounting and Related Services majors rank dead last in mean starting salary out of of seven business-related academic fields (based on 2022 data).
The mean starting accountant salary is $60,700 while a Financial Management Services major graduate starts out at $66,650. Computer and Information Science majors do the best fresh out of college at just under $87K per year, followed by: Engineering ($76K); Mathematics and Statistics ($76K); Statistics ($76K); and Management Information Systems and Services ($71K).
Personal Finance Matters — So Does Work-Life Balance
“Raising starting salaries was the most agreed-upon solution for growing the [accounting] pipeline,” the NPAG says. But other factors — work-life balance and well-being — also move the needle for recent graduates and current students:
- 80% say they’d be more loyal to flexible employers that offer remote or hybrid schedules
- 76% believe flexibility is a major draw for other business pros, and
- more than 70% recommended employers offer “more manageable workloads for accounting and finance employees” to reduce stress and burnout.
Working pros and students didn’t see eye to eye on all potential solutions for drawing and rewarding accountants. For example: 83% of students think companies should award bonuses for passing the CPA exam, while just 63% of workers agreed. The same percentage of students think employees should be able to use paid time off to study for the CPA exam, compared to just 59% of their senior counterparts.
