Internland Week 3
Miranda Oliverius
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.
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.
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