JUNIOR AUDITOR DAY-TO-DAY / what auditors *actually* do & graduate advice (EY, KPMG, PwC, Deloitte)

so this is what i wish i knew before i started my role as an audit junior because no one really talks enough about what you do day to day the activities platform part of your daily job and also knowing this information really helps for when you're in an interview stage for thinking of questions and actually understanding if this is the job you really do want to do [Music] so in this video i'm going to talk about the general context of an audit engagement what actually happens during busy season and why it's actually stressful like why all those memes are a thing speaking to the client and how to speak to the client what you'll actually speak to the client about especially in your first year or your first two years speaking to your team and then general kind of like excel and kind of technical tips [Music] so the general context of an audit engagement is that your audit file be structured through planning testing evaluating and concluding and this is a really high level overview of the file and it could be different from client to client and depending on what software you use as well and as a junior you'll probably be involved in the planning and testing parts of the audit and generally in the lower risk areas and you'll kind of move up as you progress so your team will have decided what's lower risk in the planning phase maybe have decided this before you've even started but lower risk areas are kind of usually like cash accounts receivable ppe if it's not a new client that you're working on you'll probably have a lot of files rolled over from the prior year which means that a lot of them will have been updated and planning and it might be your job to update them as well and remember that when something is rolled forward just remember to kind of always try and apply a new perspective to it and not just simply robotically update it for the current year your actual contribution will consist of probably documenting your knowledge of the client of any kind of events that are relevant in like the current year of the audit and your team will probably put you on this because it helps you to get to know the client in your first few months or your first year because the better you know your client and the better you know kind of up-to-date issues the easier it is to resolve things as they come up during the audit so you can do this through google news searches using any maybe firm specific kind of databases that you have access to the financial times and generally things like that a really good one to do as well is to type the company name and look up news on twitter as well and that's a bit of a different one but it does help in trying to find kind of up-to-date news items and when it comes to actually doing the testing make sure you know exactly what's required of you and ask as many questions as you need to and you know what everything means including all the different acronyms and things like that and when you're actually doing the testing don't be afraid to just find out why or the background of every single thing so for example if you're testing accounts receivable you'll need a listing of all the invoices due to the client you should tie this to the a total amount of accounts receivable probably sitting in the trial balance that they would have given you or the team earlier on in the audit and then once you sample the invoice listing you'll have to ask them for invoices and you'll have to ask like why certain ones haven't been paid if it's been kind of a long time since they sent the invoice out you'll have to ask why you'll have to ask the client about their relationship with their customer if they pay late regularly all this kind of thing you have to make sure that you know and understand fully how the client works so usually there is a lot of back and forth with the client depending on what they have given you and then your like questions afterwards and timing wise you'll always be working around kind of like partner review deadlines and actual legal deadlines every piece of work you do will go through at like probably minimum two rounds of review so one review by your kind of senior or your manager and then another review by someone higher up and then another review by the partner and you usually work to get it through that first round of review clear any points down and then the second round of review and then clearly major points are raised after that as well and partners usually have to sign off absolutely everything in the file and you will probably be doing a lot more sections at the same time so project management and time management working around the kind of partners deadlines and priorities on each sections that will be a huge part of your job as well so you'll be doing that on loads of different clients all the way through the year and that's basically audit developing some project management skills as early as you can will be hugely helpful for later on in your career [Music] so busy season is infamously the first quarter of the year in the uk anyway and it's really stressful because of the fact that most clients financial year ends are the end of the year so 31st of december and for a lot of companies that are part of big international groups there's usually a deadline to submit the financial statements to the sec if the parent is based in the us for example and the entity that you're auditing is part of u.s scope which is why the first two to four weeks will be quite stressful because you have to get through this entire audit in a very compact amount of time and the client themselves have to process a lot having their year end at the end of december then having to kind of provide everything to you as the auditor in a timely manner in those two to four weeks that you're trying to get everything done so the hours can be long just purely due to the volume of the work that you have to get through but usually you do have a really good team structure and the time and the team size has been thought of in advance and what i'd emphasize for busy season is just getting good system and hold on kind of stress management and making sure that you get time away from your work laptop and time to kind of devote to any hobbies and things that keep you sane just for those two to four weeks as well as having a really good relationship with your team because you spend a lot of time with these people [Music] so it will feel really nerve-wracking speaking to the client in the first few months of your job due to not really knowing what you're asking for half the time and not really knowing why you're asking for it and the way i would get around this or kind of stop my nerves is to basically clarify really really well and really really thoroughly with your team what exactly you're asking for and why you're asking for it before you go and speak to the client in person or email them and when you do speak to the client write absolutely everything they say down it's super super super important to build a really good relationship with the client as well because it just makes things easier in the long run when you're asking for things and because you do spend so much time with them in their offices during all these busy seasons it's just nicer to have a better relationship with them i had a lot of retail jobs before my job at the big four so i was okay with this but definitely speaking to the client more and getting to know them as people just helps with it and it develops naturally the same kind of thing applies to your team as well you're spending a lot of time with them so get to know them and the same thing about writing everything down applies to speaking to your team as well as speaking to your client as well and i would just recommend that you always have a notepad and a pen with you and your first year on the job at least your first year and then every time you're speaking to someone in a professional capacity write down everything they say write down your own questions and you can always reference back to it having a good relationship with your team also makes it so much easier to ask questions when you're stuck because talking a problem out is so much easier than getting stuck in a rabbit hole of trying to solve it yourself and this is a key piece of information i want you to take away do not ever get stuck in a rabbit hole of trying to do something yourself always talk it out and if you have the capacity to do so pay attention to what your senior is doing i mentioned this in my tips for your corporate career video but what your seniors doing will be your job in a year's time so you might as well pay attention to what they're doing how they're doing it and prepare yourself for that role just so it's not too much when you eventually take over [Music] for the excel things and technical tips a lot of the stuff will be provided to you by your firm there'll be a lot of training educational stuff thrown at you so what i'd recommend is just to kind of get used to excel and learn how to do some macros it will feel overwhelming but because you're kind of dealing with it all the time it just again becomes second nature the things i use on excel the most are formulas such as kind of sumifs concatenates vlookups subtotals pivot tables are a huge one and filtering and manipulating large data sets and also using all the financial functions on excel as well so get used to absolutely everything on excel you can learn all the alt and fn shortcuts as well just to help you because i think the less time you're spending using your mouse the more efficient you're gonna be and always remember that whenever you think there's a quicker way to do something there a hundred percent is and i just google everything if i need a quick way to do something i will google it i will actually google the question and just put how to do something on excel and i'll learn how to do it within five minutes and that's it that's a skill that you've just taught yourself and if you take the time to learn how to set up and use macros that's a lot of time you can save yourself in the future as well so that is a very high level and quick overview of a lot of the things you'll be doing day to day in your first year as an audit junior so i hope this helps and if you have any questions at all please do let me know i put this video out there because i didn't have anyone to really ask these questions to they sometimes felt a little bit too stupid to ask and it's a really nice overview to have of the job while you're interviewing for it and also while you're in preparation for starting as well so yeah i hope you enjoyed this video and let me know if you have any questions thanks for watching [Music] bye [Music] you

Channel: Devamsha

Views: 423,522

Keywords: account, accounting, finance, finance and accounting, finance and accounting jobs, accounting jobs, finance jobs, auditing, auditors, assurance, pwc jobs, pwc, kpmg, ey, deloitte, what do auditors do, what is audit, what is auditing, what is assurance, what does audit mean, what is audit job like, day in a life of an auditor, what to expect as an auditor, should i do audit, should i do assurance, what do auditors actually do, should i apply for audit, ca, cpa

Id: L-TCjokRfWY

Length: 9min 57sec (597 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 02 2020