Prague Update

The first week started off pretty somberly with presentation after presentation about how things work at PWC and how to go through a process of an audit. It sounds boring the way I’m typing it but I found it pretty interesting. I’m getting a better idea of the whole process but If this is anything like tax preparation I’ll learn a lot of it as I go along. I had one job where I had to go through an entire system of audit documents and track all of the proposed changes and that really showed me what I would be doing as an auditor.

On my first day everyone went out for lunch but I packed a sandwich and went to the top floor to eat. I had to stop for a moment because the top of the office (where the cafeteria is) has a magnificent view of the city. I was sitting there eating my sandwich looking at the view and thinking to myself … well I don’t know what I was thinking but I realized I was the place that I dreamed of back in the fall when I realized I may not have any internship; now I’m interning abroad at a big 4 accounting firm overlooking the Prague skyline eating a $2 sandwich.

My first accounting related work was on Thursday. It was simple I was just checking the math on some financial statements for a major oil company. Even with a job with something as simple as checking the math on a financial statement I was able use my accounting knowledge even just to know what numbers should be added together (a statement of cash flows can be confusing if you’ve never seen one before)
Since then I went on a site visit, found some very minor errors in some financial statements (one of which actually required a working knowledge of accounting so there is one point for a college education).

The next week I had started to earn the trust of the people in the TICE (Technology, Information, Communication, and Entertainment) department, and I was getting some more serious work. Most of it related to the process of accounting and not actually accounting work but I feel I will have to work up to that. My biggest project so far was bringing together general ledger accounts from three companies with the closing balances at the open of 2009, 5 months in, 6 months in, 2009 close, and then 3 months into 2010. This was a simple project in spirit but when you consider that the smallest of the three companies I had to perform this for had 250 accounts I needed to use my high level excel function skills to find a way through this. This job took me 11 hours to complete (it would have taken a week to do it by hand) and I was coming in early to work on it and if I didn’t have to buy train tickets I would have stayed late. I guess I’m becoming an accountant.

In closing I’m starting to feel that I’ll like being an accountant. I have had moments of joy so far and moments where I just wanted to shake my computer screen until all the little numbers on the spreadsheet jumbled around like an Etch-a-sketch. I look forward to the weeks to come as my responsibilities increase and so does the experience.