Advantages and Disadvantages of Doing Articleship from Small Firms

Articleship is referred as a golden period in a CA Student journey and the most important part of Chartered Accountancy course. Therefore, it is important to decide from where you want to complete your practical training.

Many of the students have a dream to go for articleship from reputed firms like Big 4 while others prefer to take their articleship from small firms and with this article we are going to share you some advantages and some disadvantages of doing articleship from small firms.

Also Don’t forget to read – Which is the best place to do articleship?

Let’s start with advantages first –

Get Time to Study

When student commence their articleship from medium or small firms, they get enough time to prepare themselves for Final Exams which is very hard to expect in big firms. Candidates who are doing articleship from the big firms often seems to get transfer after the first transfer due to the overload work pressure. Therefore, this is a big advantage of doing articleship from the big firms.

Direct Communication with the Top Management

It’s very hard to discuss your queries directly from the employer or the top management. You have to communicate with your seniors and they will communicate (if needed) to the boss. But in small firms, whenever you face any problem whatever the problem may be you can directly communicate it with your boss, one another fascinating advantage of doing articleship in small firms.

Satisfactory Help from the staff and Boss

Not only office matters, but in small concerns employers and seniors generally seems to understand your problems. For ex when you join a particular class and your class timings get clash with the office timing the boss allows you which could not be possible in Big firms due to the strict discipline.

Get a chance to learn all work beside audit  

Many of my friends who completed their articleship from the Big firms have an excellent knowledge of auditing but what other than this? Unlike a trainee from the small firm, articles of big firms have not learned to file ITR even after two years of their training. In the small and Medium firms, you can learn far beside auditing like tax returns, departmental work, handling clients and much more.

No overload work pressure

If we exclude the peak times, like the month of July and September or last dates for return filing then you would not be pressurized with an overload work pressure. But if we talk about big firms, then you have to handle the work pressure all over the year either due to Internal Audits or some other assignments.

Disadvantages of articleship from small forms

Less exposure to Audit Tasks

Definitely, you can get a brilliant audit experience through the Big Firms. There you can learn all types of audit work like Internal Audit, Statutory Audit, sometimes cost audit along with Tax Audit which scope is limited in Middle size firms.

Free Time can Irritate You

Excluding the peak time, you get a lot of free time sometimes which can irritate you. In such a meanwhile neither you can complete your personal pending work nor you can go home. Sitting ideal can sometimes lead to frustration.

Companies prefer from Big firms for the Job

Students who scored well in their IPCC can only join Big Firms and definitely each company wants such brilliant student in their team. Therefore, every company gives a priority to those students who completed their practical training from big firms.

Repeated tasks for all three years

In small firms number of articles and number of employees are limited. So they learn all the work in their first year only and which make their remaining years not that interesting. They become expert in what they are doing amid these three years.

Limited exposure due to small clients

Number of clients or number of big clients in small firms are limited due to which your exposure will always be limited. You won’t be able to handle the accounts of opulent clients and neither learn to handle them, a big big disadvantage of doing articleship in small firms.