Accounting
Inside the 2024 Best Firms for Young Accountants
What’s the secret to recruiting and retaining the next generation of accountants?
It’s a combination of trust, flexibility and investment, according to the 2024 class of Best Firms for Young Accountants (see the list on page 10).
In a professional landscape stressed by an ongoing talent shortage, fostering an attractive firm culture where young talent wants to work and stay is more important than ever. That involves identifying their needs and wants, which differ from those of previous generations.
Young talent wants the opportunity to grow and to feel trusted by their firms, but they also value work-life balance. They want to feel fulfilled by their professional lives and still have the time to enjoy their personal lives.
While each of the Best Firms for Young Accountants takes its own approach to retaining talent, all of their efforts point to the shared themes of trust, flexibility and professional development.
“Basically anything that needs to cater to your life, we’re up for it because we want to keep our good people, and happy people make happy workers,” said talent and engagement coordinator Kendra Anderson at Rudler, a Fort Wright, Kentucky-based firm with more than 60 employees.
Establishing trust
In a shrinking talent market, the search for new talent is shifting further upstream in the pipeline. Many firms are extending internship offers to college students as young as sophomores and beginning outreach programs to high schools.
Building out a robust internship program is a great way to build for the future, according to Holly Feltenberger, director of talent acquisition and retention at McKonly & Asbury, a Camp Hill, Pennsylvania-based firm with over 120 employees: “If you don’t have the students coming in to learn and grow, then you’re going to stagnate, and your employees are going to stagnate and they’re going to be, I think, unhappy.”
A student’s internship experience is crucial to their decision to stay at the firm. That means training them and trusting them with real work — not just having them push paper. “We expect you to do the same job,” Janice Snyder, assurance and HR partner at McKonly & Asbury, said. “We’re not putting on a show. We want you to know what it’s really like to work here.”
Meanwhile, Austin, Texas-based Maxwell Locke & Ritter focuses its recruiting efforts on experienced hires with five or more years of experience. By focusing on this demographic, new hires require less training than interns and can hit the ground running, clients are better served, engagement teams can be slimmer, and the firm experiences lower turnover.
One significant application of trust is remote work. At Maxwell Locke & Ritter, “We don’t have a policy. We basically tell people to work what’s best for them,” leading partner Kyle Park said. “We expect you to be available and accessible — not only to people inside the firm, but to your clients — and as long as you are, we don’t really care where you’re at. … We treat everyone as a professional. We’re not babysitting or hand-holding anyone.”
Of the firm’s 138 employees, roughly a third are remote and based outside the office’s locality, another third are remote and local, and the remaining third work a range of schedules from hybrid to fully in office.
Meanwhile, WilkinGuttenplan, based in East Brunswick, New Jersey, has employees working across 11 states. Of its 138 employees, “pretty much everybody” is remote unless they choose to work in the office, said talent acquisition and development manager Fatima Sabir.
“People have different obligations outside of work, so we want to make it easy for them,” Sabir said. “That correlates to working parents, but it doesn’t even have to be working parents — it could be anybody. You could be taking care of your own parents. You could have a dog. Whatever the case is, obviously we know these individuals are important to you, even pets.”
Susan Yohn, director of HR at Brown Plus, a 124-person firm in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, explained the benefits of allowing employees the freedom to work from home: “What it has allowed us to do is retain our team members. … We are able to look outside of our geographical region for talent. The talent shortage is real, so we’re able to bring in great talent from different locations.”
Transparent leadership and upper management is also crucial to fostering a culture of trust that retains young accountants. At Brown Plus, leadership is very visible: “For every new hire that comes in, we have a morning mixer for them where people can come down and talk to them and just say hi. We provide breakfast and just kind of get them more acquainted with people in the firm,” Yohn said.
There needs to be a consistent message between what people hear and what people see. Management must practice what they preach. That increases trust and, in turn, opens the door for candid conversations and feedback.
The Brown Plus Emerging Professionals group facilitates just that. The group is comprised of employees with zero to seven years of experience. Together, they host volunteering and networking events, as well as lunch-and-learns. Once a year, BEP members present their feedback and concerns to the board and offer suggestions for improvement. “Last year, our paid parental leave policy paid for two weeks of paid leave, but they were looking to increase that. So we increased to three weeks of paid leave,” Yohn said.
Groups and committees such as these give young people a stake in the firm without being a stakeholder. Allowing them to contribute ideas and shape the firm fosters a sense of belonging.
Even something as simple as the dress code comes down to trust, too. The best firms all follow a “dress for your day” or “dress to your client” policy. So on days with no meetings, employees are welcome to wear jeans and sneakers, or even shorts and hoodies in some offices. On days they meet with clients, they’re expected to dress to the client’s standard.
“How someone is dressed doesn’t affect how they do their jobs,” McKonly & Asbury’s Snyder said. “When we go to our clients, we dress how they dress. If the client is in suits, we’re in suits. If our client wants us to wear jeans, then we’re going to wear jeans. We’re going to respect their wishes. But when someone’s in our office, it just doesn’t matter.”
Making the investment
Next-generation accountants want their firm to invest in them as much as they’re investing in the firm. That’s why the top Best Firms for Young Accountants all have professional development in common. That can look like reimbursements for continued education, CPE courses and tracking, CPA exam prep, days off for taking the exam, bonuses for passing, and support groups for those studying.
“There’s a lot more to development than just doing a job,” McKonly & Asbury’s Feltenberger said. “There’s a lot more relationally, there’s a lot more emotional intelligence that people have to develop … People don’t realize that.”
At her firm, that looks like interns being assigned a buddy when they start. This is the “baseline,” Feltenberger said. “When you don’t feel comfortable going to your supervisor or direct report, you can ask your buddy questions. You can be a little more open and honest and feel more comfortable.”
Everyone at the firm also receives a direct report — a manager who is personally invested in driving their career and works with partners and leaders to facilitate that employee’s growth — as well as a mentor, whom the employee chooses.
Keeping it real
The focus on mental wellness and enabling work-life balance is perhaps among the most important aspects of what makes these firms the best for young people, who simply want to be treated as human beings.
That means feeling heard and seen. “Bring it on. Tell us what you don’t like,” Snyder said. “I have meetings with younger staff and say, ‘Tell me something you think I don’t want to hear.'”
WilkinGuttenplan utilizes a commitment schedule basis rather than implementing across-the-board hours requirements. Accountants decide on a minimum target of hours worked (billable and nonbillable) that they want to meet through the year. “Do they want to just work that minimum target, or do they want to exceed that minimum target?” Sabir said. “We give them the opportunity to tell us what makes sense for them.”
There, accountants can start their day whenever it works best for them, whether that’s 8 a.m. or 11 p.m., and the firm encourages people to establish boundaries and push back if they are asked to work outside of their set schedule.
“That’s kind of our human approach to everything,” Sabir explained. “When we get on calls, we understand we’re all humans, and it’s a very comfortable environment where you can vocalize and have open communication, candid feedback, everybody truly just understands one another.”
At Rudler, Anderson finds unique ways to plan fun, de-stressing activities for both in-office and remote employees. “Anything that we do in office, I try to make a version of it that caters to the remote people,” she said.
During tax season, for example, they hire a massage company to come to the office, while remote workers get mailed an at-home spa kit. On Valentine’s Day, Anderson took inspiration from nostalgic elementary school years and had employees decorate tissue boxes to collect candy and cards. “Of course one of the guys had to do a beer box,” she joked. “We just try to keep it really lighthearted.”
“Whatever a person needs to flourish mentally, we really try to cater to that,” Anderson continued. “Burnout, we know that’s real. That’s why we do a lot of fun things throughout tax season, like the coffee carts, playing games, weekly bingo, massages.”
These firms also adhere to their core values and make tangible, consistent efforts to demonstrate them.
“We’re flexible. We’re very employee-friendly. By flexible, I mean in terms of working hours — where you work, how you work, that type of thing. Friendly, meaning we want you to live life outside of the office,” Maxwell Locke & Ritter’s Park said. “We have a saying that no success at work is worth failure at home, and you can interpret that however you want it to be.”
“We genuinely care about one another,” Holocombe added. “We care about each other as employees and coworkers, but we really care about each other as people.”
Even after the biggest May jump in 35 years for the S&P 500, investors’ understandable confusion about the future of tax and tariff policies and inflation is driving a lot of anxiety.
The S&P’s value
Beyond questions of how potential tariffs might affect inflation,
Many high net worth and ultrahigh net worth clients who work with David Lesperance, the founder of immigration tax and law advisory firm
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Responding to uncertainty
In the case of Lesperance’s ultrawealthy clients, that means taking steps as drastic as seeking residency outside of the country and offshore citizenship in anticipation of a recession next year and the political pendulum swinging back toward Democrats, who might adopt taxes on unrealized gains or that target billionaires or millionaires. Other investors may be acting toward much more immediate needs or
Out of 373 retirees polled between March 25 and April 17 as part of the Schroders
“While advisors and clients can’t control Washington, they can control how they respond,” Boyden continued. “Sticking to a financial plan, staying invested through market cycles, and resisting the urge to make emotional decisions are all variables within their control. Periods of heightened uncertainty present an opportunity for advisors to deepen relationships by communicating with clients more frequently to help them reassess goals, understand allocations and feel more confident in their strategy. Our data shows that many retirees are without a plan or professional guidance — this void is an opportunity for advisors.”
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Answering the unknowables
Those retirees and other investors are struggling to find answers that aren’t even clear to some of the top experts trying to figure out the form and implications of taxes and tariffs in the future. Ongoing court cases have placed
But the bill garnered enough support to pass the House by one vote and the backing of influential groups like the pro-business
The outlook has grown so blurry that David Kelly, the chief global strategist of JPMorgan Asset Management, compared investors’ task of figuring out next steps to the challenge of five argumentative siblings putting together a 1,000-piece puzzle.
“Despite political tensions, ongoing policy changes and heightened inflation and recession concerns, 2025 so far has generated positive returns for investors, with the S&P 500 and the bond markets registering small gains and international stocks posting much larger increases,” Kelly said in a June 2 note. “This is no time for complacency, however. The outlook for the economy is for just slow GDP growth, smaller job gains and temporarily higher inflation. This should translate into sticky interest rates, decelerating earnings growth and a falling dollar. At the start of the year, given valuations and portfolio concentration, it made sense for investors to rebalance away from U.S. mega-cap growth stocks and towards more defensive U.S. stocks, international equities and alternatives. Five months into the year, while the macro jigsaw remains complicated, the same advice seems warranted.”
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Legislative agenda
As for the tax and spending bill, President Trump’s Republican allies in the Senate have discussed a possible goal of passing the massive legislation by July 4. But voting the legislation through the Senate could prove difficult, according to Jonathan Traub, a managing principal and the leader of the Tax Policy Group at consulting and professional services firm
“For both policy and procedural reasons, we can expect changes to the current legislation,” Traub said in a statement after the House passage of the bill last month. “It will remain a tremendous challenge for Republican leaders to keep near unanimity among their members given the push and pull on so many major components of the bill.”
Provisions of the bill as wide-ranging as the level of tax brackets and states’ ability to
“There’s a whole bunch of opportunity, but in order to do that you need to get a whole bunch of planning in place,” Lesperance said. “It’s very interesting on the planning side, but people are scrambling, and they’re making educated bets.”
Significant changes are in store for President Donald Trump’s signature $3.9 trillion tax-cut bill as the Senate begins closed-door talks this week on legislation that squeaked through the House by a single vote.
Senate Republican leaders are aiming to make permanent many of the temporary tax cuts in the House bill, a move that would increase the bill’s more than $2.5 trillion deficit impact. But doing so risks alienating fiscal hawks already at war with party moderates over the bill’s safety-net cuts.
It amounts to a game of chess further complicated by the top Senate rules-keeper, who will decide whether some key provisions violate the chamber’s strict rules. Jettisoning those provisions — which include gun silencer regulations and artificial intelligence policy — could sink the bill in the House.
House Republicans’ top tax writer, Representative Jason Smith, on Friday said that senators need to leave most of the bill untouched in order to ensure it can pass the House in the end.
“I would encourage my counterparts, don’t be too drastic, be very balanced,” he said.
The wrangling imperils Republicans’ goal of sending the “Big, Beautiful Bill” to Trump’s desk by July 4. But the real deadline is sometime in August or September, when the Treasury Department estimates the US will run out of borrowing authority.
The House bill would raise the government’s legal debt ceiling by $4 trillion, which the Senate wants to increase to $5 trillion in order to push off the next fiscal cliff until after the 2026 congressional elections.
That’s just one of the major changes the Senate will weigh in the coming weeks. Here are others:
Permanent business breaks
Senate Finance Chairman Mike Crapo’s top priority is making permanent the temporary business tax cuts that the House bill sunsets after 2029. These are the research and development tax deduction, the ability to use depreciation and amortization as the basis for interest expensing, and 100% bonus depreciation of certain property, including most machinery and factories.
Senate Republicans plan to use a budget gimmick that counts the extension of the individual provisions in the 2017 Trump tax bill as having no cost. That gives them room to make the additional business tax cuts and possibly extend some of the new four-year individual cuts in the House bill like those on tips and overtime.
Deficit hawks could demand new offsets, however, either in the form of spending cuts or ending tax breaks like one on carried interest used by private equity.
Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg
The SALT cap
The House expanded the state and local tax deduction limit from $10,000 to $40,000 to get blue-state Republicans behind the bill. But SALT isn’t an issue in the Senate, where high-tax states like California, New York and New Jersey are represented by Democrats.
“I can’t think of any Senate Republicans who think more than $10,000 is needed and I can think of several who think the number should be zero,” said Rohit Kumar, a former top Senate staffer now with Big Four firm PwC.
That includes deficit hawks like Louisiana’s John Kennedy, who has balked at the House’s SALT boost.
Senators could propose keeping the current $10,000 SALT cap as a low-ball counter, forcing the House to settle from something in the ballpark of a $30,000 cap, Kumar said.
The Senate could also change new limits on the abilities of passthrough service businesses to claim SALT deductions.
Green energy tax credits
Moderate Republicans in the Senate are pushing back on provisions in the House bill that gut tax credits for solar, wind, battery makers and several other clean energy sectors.
Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said she’s seeking to soften aggressive phaseouts of tax credits for clean electricity production and nuclear power. She has the backing of at least three other Republicans, giving her enough leverage to make demands in a chamber where opposition from four GOP senators would kill the bill.
Their demands will run headlong into ultraconservatives, who already think the House bill doesn’t get rid of tax benefits for clean energy fast enough.
Medicaid, Food Stamps
Senators Rand Paul of Kentucky, Rick Scott of Florida, Mike Lee of Utah and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin say they’re willing to sink the bill if it doesn’t cut more spending.
“I think we have enough to stop the process until the president gets serious about reductions,” Johnson said recently on CNN.
They haven’t made specific demands yet, but they could start off where the House Freedom Caucus fell short — cutting the federal matching payment for Medicaid for those enrolled under Obamacare and further limiting federal reimbursement for Medicaid provider taxes charged by states.
Conservatives’ demands are in stark contrast to Republican senators already uncomfortable with the new Medicaid co-pays and state cost-sharing for Medicaid and food stamps in the House bill. Senators Josh Hawley of Missouri, Susan Collins of Maine, and Jim Justice and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia join Murkowski in this camp.
Boosting their case is Trump, who told the Freedom Caucus to stop “grandstanding” on more Medicaid cuts.
Regulatory matters
There’s an extensive list of regulatory matters in the House bill that could be struck if they are found to break Senate rules for averting a filibuster and passing the legislation by a simple majority.
Provisions likely to be challenged for not being primarily budgetary in nature include a repeal of gun silencer regulations, preemption of state artificial intelligence regulations, staffing regulations for nursing homes and abolishing the Direct File program at the Internal Revenue Service.
The House bill’s provisions limiting the ability of federal judges to hold administration officials in contempt, ending funding for Planned Parenthood, requiring congressional review of new regulations and easing permitting of fossil fuel projects are also vulnerable.
The biggest Senate rules fight will be over using the “current policy” budget gimmick to lower the cost of the bill. Senate Republican leaders could explore bypassing rules keeper Elizabeth MacDonough if she finds the accounting move breaks the rules.
Battles over these provisions could take weeks.
“I think it would be very difficult to get it out of the Senate quickly,” said Bill Hoagland, a former top Republican Senate budget staffer now with the Bipartisan Policy Center.
Spectrum sales as pay-fors
A major auction of government radio spectrum that would generate an estimated $88 billion in revenue is another unresolved fight.
Ted Cruz of Texas, the Senate Commerce chair, backs the spectrum sale but Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota has vowed to protect the Defense Department, which has warned auctioning off its spectrum would degrade its capabilities and cost hundreds of billions for retrofits.
The proposal would free up key spectrum for wireless broadband giants like Verizon and Elon Musk’s Starlink.
The estate tax
Majority Leader John Thune and 46 other Republican senators back a total repeal of the estate tax, which would likely cost several hundred billion dollars over a decade, benefiting the heirs of the richest 0.1%. That could make it too pricey for the Senate to include.
The House bill permanently increases the estate tax exemption to $15 million for individuals and $30 million for married couples, with future increases tied to inflation.
Private-equity backed accounting firm Ascend has added Florida Regional Leader firm Saltmarsh, Cleaveland & Gund and California-based Glenn Burdette to its platform, effective June 1.
Saltmarsh, Cleaveland & Gund, based in Pensacola and Tampa, Florida, and Glenn Burdette, in San Luis Obispo, California, are the latest firms to join Arlington, Virginia-based Ascend, which is backed by private equity firm Alpine Investors and ranked No. 29 on Accounting Today‘s
Glenn Burdette formerly operated under an employee stock ownership plan and adds a central California presence to Ascend along with a team of 75 and seven partners, while Saltmarsh marks Ascend’s first Florida footprint and adds a team of 16 partners and 178 total team members to the firm.
Ascend reported $314.74 million in revenue and 1,464 employees in 2024.
Terms of both deals were not disclosed.
“These are two monumental partnerships for Ascend,” said Ascend president Nishaad in a statement. “Glenn Burdette was founded 60 years ago, and in 2000 became the first CPA firm in California to form an ESOP. That decision marked the firm’s commitment to a set of core values that they still wear on their sleeve today – a desire to provide opportunity for their people, a focus on shared ownership as an enabler of success, and a fierce commitment to hold the pen on their own story.”
Glenn Burdette provides tax, audit, bookkeeping, business consulting and financial management services, primarily to middle-market and small owner-managed businesses.
“Partnering with Ascend is the right move at the right time for Glenn Burdette,” said the firm’s CEO David Merlo. “Their forward-thinking approach and shared values make them a natural fit for our next chapter. We chose Ascend because of their strong commitment to reimagining what’s possible — for both our clients and our people.”
Saltmarsh, Cleaveland and Gund is a full-service accounting and advisory firm offering expertise and specialized consulting for many industries and high-net-worth individuals.
“Saltmarsh has an equally proud history, with an 80-year legacy in Florida’s panhandle and central cities,” said Ruparel in a statement. “The firm is synonymous with quality, is a longstanding best-place-to-work, and has a dynamic group of partners that are seen as trusted advisors across disciplines. Less than a year ago, Lee Bell and the Saltmarsh leadership team took the time they needed to articulate a strategic vision that would carry the firm into the next decade and enumerate a plan for achieving that vision. We feel privileged that they decided Ascend is best positioned to help them fulfill those ideals.”
“The success of our business is entirely about putting our people first so they can do what they love, which is helping our clients achieve success,” said Saltmarsh Advisors CEO Lee Bell in a statement. “Ascend’s intense focus on people and their unique concentration on supporting our more than 80-year legacy as Saltmarsh is why we made the decision to partner with them.”
Both Glenn Burdette and Saltmarsh are independent members of the BDO Alliance.
Since Ascend was launched in early 2023, it has made a significant number of investments, including including
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