Fortune magazine's list of the "100 Best Companies to Work For" included several accounting firms and software developers.
Plante & Moran was the top-ranked firm at No. 44, above Ernst & Young at 57, KPMG at 71, PricewaterhouseCoopers at 90 and Deloitte & Touche USA at 95. Software vendors whose products are used by many accountants also made the cut. They included SAS Institute at 29, Intuit at 43, Paychex at 51 and Microsoft at 86.
Companies selected for the list were strong job creators. The 100 companies on the 2008 list added 67,000 employees to their payrolls in the past year and employ a total of nearly 1.6 million employees, according to Fortune. That total was 16 percent higher than the number of employees of the companies on last year's list.
This is the tenth year that Plante & Moran has made the list. "Over the years we've focused on our people and it's allowed us to better service our clients," said Bill Hermann, managing partner of Plante & Moran. "There's a 'we care' attitude that we believe differentiates us in the workplace, as well as in delivering service to our clients."
He pointed out that the firm has a parenting tightrope committee that focuses on the needs of the parents on the staff, as well as the staff's parents. "Frank Moran had a belief that the whole person comes to work," said Hermann. "There's a balance between personal life and professional life, and you need to maintain that. I've been with the firm for 37 years and this goes back a long way in history. It's just a great place to be a CPA."
