I have been reading this post for quite some time and I want to add in my view, so that you can hear how someone that uses your services seees you. Even if it will be bashed about - its still some feedback - and not another insider opinion. The Big 4 are exclusively audit companies. Whenever we hire EY / KPMG etc etc we are hiring auditors. this is Regardless of whether they are doing finance strategy, accounting, commercial due diligence etc. We, as the banking industry, see all these 'transaction' services as 'accounting' driven or related. We NEVER refer to people from the big 4 as consultants when we are engaged on deals - even if they come from Deloitte Strategy vs. KPMG SCI vs whatever. The point I am trying to make is that it doesnt matter what service you are delivering - its all due diligence ie. 'accounting' work. 'Consultants' is a term we resrve exclusively for MBBB and a few others. This is not to say that one is better than the other. As far as IB and PE are concerened, I know myself and a lot of colleagues would much rather have a cracking accountant / financial modeller than a consultant from Bain explaing to me in 5 slides why my 40bn p&l is wrong. Be true to yourself and your job - its very respectable. Dont quibble over lables.

how wonderfully one sided of you.first of all"We, as the banking industry"so there are no other industries where consultants work in? of course the big 4 provide consultancy services - sure look at them just sweeping the management consultancy awards. call it what you want, but when the big 4 advise clients in a non-audit, non-accountacy fashion, this is CONSULTING. get used to it and stop being so narrow minded. you obviously don't know all of the services the big 4 provide. that being said yes it is true the bulk of the revenue is accounting/auditing focused - but there is still loads of advisory/consulting going on...!

"sure look at them just sweeping the management consultancy awards"http://www.mca.org.uk/MCA/Awards/ThisYear.aspxerrr....hardly any accounting firms were winners in 2007

is anyone taking this awards serious??

I hope not! I was just pointing out the amount of awards that accounting firms actually won was very small (1 out of 14, 7%) compared to claim in the second post. Doesn't mean that their work isn't good, I have used their strategy wings for specific projects. Rather I was correcting a factual inaccuracy!

The first poster is clearly a merchant banker.He and his industry are going to see a lot of accountants in the near future. Forensic accountants untangling the mess these incompetent twits have caused.And the MCA awards - who gives a?

Am I the only one confused, the 2007 awards I can see on the website have Deloitte winning 3 and EY 2 from 9.

You still dont understand. THe first poster was trying to explain that even though you and the other 400,000 that work at EY and Deloitte may refer to it as 'management consulting' - and have awards for it, the rest of the world still calls it audit / accouning / due diligence services. the big 4 are considered consultants only by those that work within the same firms - which is over a million people.

This chain seems to think being a classed as exclusively "management consulting" is a good thing.'Fraid not. Clients like their consultants to know their businesses inside out so they can add value.Don't forget also that most of the firms who claim to be consulting are little more than a band of IT technicans with some whizzy PowerPoint slides.