Job Description

My role as an audit intern involved:

1) Vouching Documents

     The bulk of my work as an intern revolved around documents like invoices, payment vouchers, delivery orders and shipping bills. I would go through files and files of these documents especially when substantive testing was needed. Apart from having gained quite some muscle from all the heavy lifting as well as some paper cuts, I did become more familiar with the documents involved in a business' daily transactions, which is not something that is exposed enough of in a class room. As most of my seniors would say, vouching is an integral part of audit especially for interns like me who need to start from the bottom and understand the basic transactions to be able to do more challenging work. Vouching has required me to practice on exercising caution and professional judgement as to whether a document had been tampered with. Vouching is important because it tests audit assertions as well as how true and fair a company's books are. If any type of fraud goes undetected by me it would affect the trueness and accuracy of work of my colleagues.

2) Contacting Debtors 

     I was entrusted with the task of completing the whole debtors' confirmation process. Firstly, I would prepare the templates accordingly followed by mailing them out to our clients' debtors. Once they have replied or even if they did not, I was required to do a follow up by calling them up. This task is particularly important to ensure whether the balance the debtors claim they owe ties to the balance recorded in our clients' books. Any differences would warrant me to inquire further as to why it is so. Another reason why this task is significant is to make sure that these debtors do in fact exist. Additionally, it has helped me improve on my people and communication skills.

3) Physical Asset Sighting

     This starts off with me selecting the sample of assets to sight to which is done through two methods. The first method being list-to-floor and then there is the floor-to-list method. The sample size would be calculated by my seniors so the larger the amount of assets a client has, the larger the sample size. This is also to ensure existence and if the assets are not labelled properly, an issue will be raised to the management. Also, if an asset did not seem to be in proper working conditions I would point it out to my seniors.

4) Casting Financial Statements

     Usually towards the end of an engagement I would cast the financial statements which applies the techniques I learned during the first week of training. Casting includes checking the totals of each column followed by cross-casting which is where all of the column totals are added together. Also, it involves writing down the sources' page numbers next to the figures so the end users of the financial statements can easily refer to them.

5) Rolling Forward Data

     Perhaps the simplest task there is to do would have to be updating the templates of workings to the current year for my team to later fill up. However, it also requires me to match the previous year data to the previous financial reports so that the variances in the workings will not be miscalculated. Any miscalculations could lead to the wrong performance evaluation of the company. 

     At the end of the day, my work did add value to my respective teams and I was not just given pointless tasks to pass the time. This made me feel like I belonged and my presence had somewhat of a significance overall.