Monday, I started my day by scanning and filing signed engagement letters that have been returned by clients. Next, I began to re-organize the tax folders in the filing cabinet; moving all associated entities together so that individuals and their businesses or trusts were next to each other. Apparently the goal of this system is to make it as easy as possible to grab all the relevant files at once when clients come in. However, it simultaneously makes it as difficult as possible for everyone else to find the files they are looking for. This also meant that I became a human road block for anyone trying to get to the copy machine since the filing cabinet is located in the narrowest part of the hallway.
                Tuesday, I went to our shelf of miscellaneous old client documents. I sorted them to make sure all the documents were with the right clients and then asked Jonath to figure out what we needed to do with them. After that, I either shredded them or prepared them for mailing. Next, there was a bit of a break between finishing that project and the next project being ready for me. During that time, I created a cheat sheet for locating client files in the cabinet. This didn’t take too long since I’d added all the associated entity columns a few weeks ago. All the locations were just the first associated entity, so I deleted the irrelevant columns and saved it as a new spreadsheet. Next, I helped Rachael label boxes for storage and then stuffed W-2 envelopes for Jonath.
                Wednesday, I filed various forms into Engagement and then into their physical binder. Then I made a spreadsheet of all of our Bookkeeping clients information so that when Rachael renews their engagement letters she can do a smooth mail merge instead of saving an individual document for each individual business. Later, I observed Tyler working on his first tax return of the season. To my credit, at the very beginning, I did help him navigate Prosystems fx Tax and Engagement to get started. Thanks to audit projects with James last summer and filing projects with Rachael this winter, I’ve gotten some practice navigating the software.
                Thursday, I worked on the bookkeeping clients spreadsheet and put together mail merges. One of the things that I figured out was how to code the mail merge fields so that they would be skipped if they were empty. This is useful because every client has a different number (and type) of services provided. If you enter them as normal mail merge fields, then you end up with several blank lines whenever a client doesn’t have many services provided. However, with the SKIPIF function, you can make the rest of the document continue as if the field was never there.
This marks the final week of my winter internship at DAPCPA. Thank you to David, Missy, Jonath, Loy, James, Toni, Tyler, and Rachael; I’m grateful for the opportunity to gain invaluable experience. To close, I figured I would end with my favorite story about accounting:
There’s a family that I’ve been babysitting for since high school, and I still babysit for them when I come home from college. One day, the boy asked me what I’m studying in college and I told him accounting. He asked what that was, and after contemplating the best way to sum it up for a small child, I replied, “Well, basically I’ll be working with money for businesses.” To which he said, “So you’ll be a cashier.” Yep. I’ll just think about that as the ultimate end goal when I’m buried in study materials for the CPA exam.

 
                I started last week, which was short due to the New Year holiday. I started by re-acquainting myself with the copy machine and the phones. I panicked briefly when I answered my first phone call, thinking I mixed up our multi-line phones with the phones at my work study job at college. However, both the client and I survived and no one got hung up on. I started with helping Rachael with the scanning and filing of various documents which helped me remember the ins and outs of Engagement. It also confirmed the importance of learning the alphabet. Hopefully my testimony will help any conflicted soul who came home from kindergarten asking, “When am I ever going to use the alphabet in real life?” Oops, I guess I used the wrong subject- that’s what K-12 students ask about math. Given that this is an accounting intern’s blog; I hope no reader is questioning the importance of mathematics.
                Throughout the remainder of the week, I helped Rachael with various other tasks to get loose ends from 2015’s projects wrapped up and get DAPCPA ready for the new year. Actually, if we’re being completely honest, we’re getting ready to do 2015 taxes. I’m starting to question how my career path is going to affect my concept of time. I suppose I can get used to living in the present, while working with the past, to affect the future.
                This week, most of my work has been on some preparations for the clients we do individual tax returns for. Throughout the week, I helped Rachael get the master client list spreadsheet all set up for this year. I love Excel, so getting to enter formulas to make it show the information she needed was an awesome way to spend my time. Next, I worked on printing, stapling, and attaching “Sign Here” stickers to control sheets and engagement letters. While working on this project I had my moment of great accomplishment for the past two weeks. Now, I have always supported female empowerment, saving your family name, and all the other reasons a woman might have to keep her maiden name. I still support whichever last name one might choose to keep or take. However, people who have a different last name than their spouse create a problem when doing a mail merge. It’s no longer simply a matter of inputting a field for title, first name(s) and last name. In order to make it work, I ended up creating a really long “If… Then…” formula to account for the following three scenarios: 1. A single individual (Mr. Buck); 2. A couple with the same last name (Mr. and Mrs. Buck); and 3. A couple with two different last names (Mr. Buck and Mrs. Doe).
                It’s great to be back, I look forward to sharing the next few weeks with you. Happy New Year!

Wow, time flies (cliché as that may sound)! I can’t believe the summer is drawing to a close, and it’s time to say goodbye (at least for now) to DAPCPA. At the beginning of the summer, David told me that my overall question to reflect on during the course of my internship was “As a CPA, what is my product? What do I sell?” I don’t know if I have the answer yet, but I’ve certainly been considering it throughout the past seven weeks.

                It sounds a bit abstract but the first answer that comes to mind is this: integrity. I’ve spent the summer watching the interactions between DAPCPA and its clients. There are names for the things clients write checks for. Names like ‘tax return,’ ‘payroll,’ and ‘bookkeeping.’ All of these services are important and make our clients’ lives easier and more productive. In the case of tax returns, accountants get to boast that their services actually put money back into their clients’ pockets.

Nevertheless, when it all boils down, I don’t think that that’s why people keep coming to CPAs. I don’t think that accountants are selling tax returns or audit reports to people, the same way that a car salesman sells Ford or Toyota vehicles. Accountants provide services that remove some hassle from their clients’ lives. I mean, I have heard rumors that not everyone thinks filling out IRS tax forms is the most exhilarating, empowering, better-than-TV-Movies-and-Games-combined way to spend their time. However, I’m pretty sure those rumors are false. I think that the reason people don’t tough it out and slough through the IRS tax instructions, and the reason that entities come to CPAs for audit or review services, is that people are buying integrity from CPAs.

Tax clients hand over massive piles of income and expense documents and walk away certain that their accountant will produce legally sound, IRS-compliant tax forms. They also trust that their accountant will find the largest tax refund (or smallest taxes owed) possible. Audit clients open their doors, filing cabinets, and computer files to CPAs trusting that the audit will assure investors, creditors, and other stakeholders that their financial numbers are true and fair, and their control systems are strong and reliable. In order for clients to be comfortable with tax returns prepared by someone else, or for stakeholders to be satisfied with an entity’s audited financial reports, they have to have an unshakeable trust in the CPAs doing these services. They aren’t paying for the completed pages of a 1040, or the glossy coil bound sheets in an independent auditor’s report. Clients are paying for- and CPAs are selling- the well-founded faith that the person completing those documents is 100% honest, well-intentioned, unbiased, unwaveringly ethical, and an expert in their field.

As I’ve shadowed the CPAs at DAPCPA, interacted with clients, and worked on various projects over this summer, I’ve seen integrity being “sold” over and over. Whether it's a phone call to get help with the questions of day-to-day business, a meeting to get on the same page, allowing the auditor to walk in and scrutinize a business, or dropping off all the payroll documents at the front desk, clients are giving faith and CPAs are returning integrity. As a CPA, being ethical comes before personal interest, money, and any other tempting incentives to do wrong. I know I haven’t fully unwrapped the depth of David’s question. There is still so much more behind the sale of integrity than was captured in this blog post. I still have mountains of things to learn. But I will be forever grateful for what my time at DAPCPA has taught me. The experience has been invaluable and I can’t wait to see where it takes me.

This week, one of the projects I spent the most time on was inputting the actual trial balance values from last year’s audit into our own trial balances. Previous to this, we had been inputting numbers from the Financial Statements and using them as “dummy TBs” to make sure our trial balances and any links from them were functioning. With the new numbers, it was fun to see some of the specific accounts and how they grouped to form the values presented on the financials.

                Later, we learned the basics of a new audit software that we’ll be using. It’s supposed to smooth out transitions from year to year; making the process more efficient by keeping things that rollover from year to year while noting things that have changed. I love working with new software, so I’m extremely excited. However, the software’s introductory video that started with how clicking the “Open” button takes you to the window to open a binder. Don’t worry, we had a large bag of popcorn to consume while we watched the video.

                Another project I got to work on was doing the Final Check over a client’s financial statements before we sent them out. I really enjoyed this project, because through doing my review of the notes, I learned to check some things I’d never thought of as being necessary before. It’s always reassuring to know that accountants double-triple-quadruple check their work, right?

               A new project for the week was a dummy tax return. This practice return was compiled by Grace, from Winter Park, and Ellen and I’s pretend clients are none other than a couple of famous celebrities- Brad and Angelina (NOT real clients). David will be reviewing our work next Monday. In between our other projects, Ellen and I worked on research and completing the tax return. Earlier today, I was entering Angelina’s fictitious sole proprietorship income. The tax software automatically filled in Brad’s name and the dummy information we created for him. While I was irritated by my inability to edit the field and correct it, it was humorous to see “Brad Beautician” listed.

                Another project we did this week was some work out in the field for an audit. We learned about cash testing and CD testing, as well as some of the other beginning steps in auditing. In addition, we did some scanning and filing so that those tests could be done.

                In between these projects, I did some various administrative projects including scanning, preparing mail, sending mail, and getting mail. This has meant that my friendship with the postage machine is blossoming. Though I was skeptical of whether it was a friend or foe the first time I used it, I have come to find it quite nifty.

               Happy Frontier Days everyone! I hope you enjoyed running around being cowboys… or hiding under a rock trying to pretend it wasn’t happening like I have been. This week, I continued work on the tax analysis letter I started at the end of last week. As I ironed out some of the specific details, it came together piece by piece. Turns out the part that I was stumped on before was because part of the assets were owned personally, but others were owned by the corporation. I don’t think the founding fathers were thinking about taxes when they declared that everyone had the right to personal property. Later, I scanned reconciliations in from a client and then tied them to the trial balance.

                Next, I worked on repairing some links that had gotten messed up in a client’s financial statement tables. We’d had a problem that started last Friday with Excel and Engagement giving us angry error messages. It befuddled the tech help line person, but eventually it got worked out. After I repaired those links, I went on to set up some more links within the statement tables and trial balances. It was rewarding to creating some intra-spreadsheet links and see the right numbers pop up.

                Later in the week, we had some more discussion with James over new projects and even got to attend a Kiwanis meeting with him. I participate in Circle K (the college branch of Kiwanis) at school and really enjoy the opportunities it’s provided me to get involved in the community. At this meeting, we heard about how the Kiwanians (I believe that’s the appropriate name) around Cheyenne have been making an impact with immunizations in developing areas.

                Finally, I started in on a new project for a different client. I started by getting files into Engagement. Then I started creating a database of their General Ledger entries. After I reached the end of putting together all twelve months of entries, I figured out that they didn’t balance. After I figure that out, I’ll be putting together their trial balance in Engagement. I really enjoy trial balances, as one of my mentors once told me, “The cool thing is that there’s only one right answer when it comes to trial balances.”

                This week brought the continuation of some previous projects, as well as a couple new ones. Throughout the entire week Ellen and I continued to work on the trial balances for the ‘main’ client from last week. I finally conquered most of the taking-three-centuries-to-load Excel problems that I had encountered last week. Instead of using the “Insert TB Link” button and subsequent window for every single link in the financial statements, I started only using “Insert TB Link” on the first cell of each table. Then, I copied the formula and made the necessary adjustments to each cell regarding the account number or trial balance name. This expedited the process, and soon Ellen and I had fallen into a good system where she would create the trial balances and account groupings, and I would enter and format the links into the financial statement tables.

                Next I did a couple smaller projects for a second client. This included comparing the bank reconciliation values from Quickbooks with the respective trial balance values in Engagement. Then, I worked with Ellen to download and electronically file some accounts receivable and payable aging details.

                One afternoon, Jonath sat down with Ellen and I and told us about his work. This was probably one of my favorite parts of the week. As he talked about his work with bookkeeping and taxes, it was easier to see how those areas of accounting are heavily relationship based. Clearly I was misinformed, but I hadn’t realized how those areas of accounting developed relationships over time as opposed to just being a once-a-year spring visit.

                Later in the week- taking a small break from trial balances and Excel- I had the opportunity to work on writing a tax analysis/opinion letter regarding the sale of a corporation. I don’t think it was supposed to be one of the challenging projects, but it has definitely stretched me. A phone call to David to clarify some questions helped, as did talking to Jonath. In addition, through some research online, I learned a lot about both the sale of goodwill and depreciation recapture. I still have some questions, especially one where I got three different answers. However, I look forward to more discussion and research next week.

                Another fun experience was going on a small field trip with James out to one of our next audit clients. I got to meet a few of the people working there, to tour the building, and to listen to James’ excitement over the new software and laptop that they’re getting. Rave reviews, I tell you; the joy was palpable.

               This week was really interesting and a lot of fun. All of our work was for one client, with only a couple diversions to some other small projects. The main project was working on some of the preparatory work regarding an audit.

                First, I finished typing the word document portion of the financial notes. Then I set to work re-creating all the Excel tables from last year’s audit, so that they can be filled with the current data. I really enjoy working in Excel, and it was a really good way to familiarize myself with the client’s account names and financial statements. It was easy to find a groove creating each table, formatting it, inputting data and formulas, and then defining named ranges so we can use them later. It was also reassuring to know that the sad blank pages with just table names/headers in the word document portion of the financial notes would be less lonely when they were joined by the Excel portion.

                One day, we had the opportunity to attend a bankruptcy hearing. Upon hearing that we were going, Ellen and I had a small nerd session; excitedly talking about how much we had enjoyed our business law classes at our respective schools. The hearing was really interesting, but our Q&A time with David afterwards was even better. We had the opportunity to ask and learn about the bankruptcy court system and the way we account for it.

                Then, we turned our attention to trial balances for the aforementioned client. We first started by making multiple trial balances and creating the account groupings for them. We later learned that we had been making too many trial balances. Correcting this mistake wasn’t terribly difficult; to remedy this, we just had to put all the groupings into one trial balance. Then we worked at it from a different direction, simply starting with one trial balance that we worked on together. We created a “dummy trial balance” using last year’s numbers to make sure we had set everything up correctly and that it actually balanced. While the normal balance of fund balances threw us off, we did successfully get the balance to zero and the net loss to the correct amount. Finally, we learned how to insert trial balance links into our spreadsheets that we’d created in Excel for the financial notes. Alas, things came full circle, so we were able to see how the various pieces of our work will eventually build on each other.

                Perhaps instead of using the cliché, “Practice makes perfect,” it’d be more accountant-like to say, “If we practice, we can be ‘reasonably assured’ that we’ll get progressively better.” Fortunately, there are trial balances to be created for each of the component units. Next, we’ll divvy up the remaining trial balances and work on our own to create them using the knowledge we gained and the skills we honed over the past week.

Throughout the week, I continued on the long-term, “in-between other projects” project of scanning and filing Signed E-Files into Engagement. It is continuing to be a good introduction to using Engagement. It also is a good exercise in learning names and identifying newlyweds with new last names and people who go by their middle names.

                My first other project on Monday was proofreading financial statement notes. I enjoy reading and editing things; however, very few errors had been made so my onscreen highlights were few and far between.

                Then, Ellen and I worked together to reconcile cash management documents using the bank statements and claim files. This project was one of our more difficult, and after a long discussion with James, we decided to change methods and finish it the next morning. On Tuesday, we wrapped up the reconciliation by using the bank statements to verify that all checks were cut within the required time period.

                Afterwards, we both scanned and filed different forms and papers before sitting down for a brainstorming session. We discussed, wrote out drafts, and re-discussed what one would write in a disclosure to explain the method with which we completed the cash management reconciliation. Our version was much shorter than James’ but we definitely learned a lot about the kinds of language to use in a disclosure.

                On Wednesday, the first task was discussing trial balances and Quickbooks with James while he gave instructions on the next project. For a period after that, I waited for Quickbooks to update because my computer was under the impression that the last update was antiquated. While it updated, I returned to the scanning and filing project. Once that was done, I restored the client’s trial balance in Quickbooks and exported it to Excel. Once in Excel, I fixed the format and checked through for any inconsistent account names or numbers. I only found two, and then was able to upload the trial balance in Engagement.

                On Thursday (the last day of the week, due to the holiday), Ellen and I spent the day re-creating financial statement notes for our next client. While I had done a similar project last week, this was still new and interesting. There was a lot more information, different key sections, and notes.

                With that, I concluded my second week here at DAPCPA. I’m really excited about the client we were working on financial note re-creation for. We’ll be working on their audit for the next while and I’m excited to see the process as it takes place.