Assistant Accountant SME

The landscape in which our Accountancy & Business Advisory department is active has been steadily changing. No longer are we just the preferred partner for small (local) enterprises and family-owned businesses, we have also built a strong presence in the international and corporate market during the last couple of years.

"Our client portfolio has been growing, the specific knowledge within our A&B teams has increased and some colleagues have committed themselves to only serve this international and corporate market going forward."
Colleague, Accountancy & Business Advisory

Serving clients like Tesla, PepsiCo, Twitter, AirBnB, Burberry, Starbucks, Sony, Moncler, and other well-known companies, BDO A&B has been adapting to this new environment. This market is a niche within our A&B department and differs from our regular practice in that:

• Our teams are required to possess more specific accounting knowledge (for both small and medium enterprises as we typically also serve medium-sized entities);
• The international/corporate market is very dynamic, deadline-driven;
• Communication between BDO and our clients is direct, volatile and straight to the point;
• Our services are, from an A&B perspective, very compliance-driven;
• We are in frequent contact with our colleagues from ITS, Global Outsourcing, FAAS, and other departments to provide a full-service package;
• We are in frequent contact with our colleagues from Member Firms around the world, mostly BDO UK and BDO USA;
• Nearly all communication is done in English, meaning our colleagues will have to speak the language at an above-average level;
• Compliance fees are typically higher and the yield on our fees is large as well. Our clients are willing to pay a price for high-level compliance work.

We also need to adjust the way we look at the preferred profile of new and potential BDO employees. A specific profile is needed, considering the aforementioned items, where native English speakers are a welcome addition to our teams. This might even mean that we will need an additional pillar in our new function profiles that are currently being developed. Our job offers will have to reflect this profile as well and will have to be tailor-made to meet our demands and needs.

Whilst we are still developing these tailor-made job offers, we’re struggling with capacity to serve these niche clients with the current teams at hand. More than before, we are using a lot of ‘hybrid colleagues’ who have no desire to fully focus on these international and corporate clients – meaning they generally don’t fit in the preferred profile and lack the specifics we are searching for. This makes us vulnerable and unable to take on all the new international work that is coming our way, limiting our growth.