Today was my first real full day at my new job. I started by 8.30 am and that makes for a nice change compared to my old job where I started at 6.30 am. So I got to my office and started up up my computer and it still hadn't finished up installing office completely...an installation that we had started on Friday. And since my workstation was incredibly slow I decided just to restart the machine completely. And after it had restarted Office was completely installed and working. I did synchronized the cloud to my laptop and that took some time, since this was the first time it had been done. But at least my Outlook and the DVO accounting software worked without any problems.
My first task was to record invoices from creditors that still belonged to the month of March. Since this was the first time me doing that for my new company it took longer than it would have usually have. But on the bright side if you have to look lots of things up you get an good impression of the way accounting had been done previously. After that had been done I was about to record all entries of the cash register for March. That's usually a very easy task and you basically can just lean back and enter it into the accounting software.
Well, it wasn't quite that easy. Every good accountant makes a cross check if the end balance on the account of the last month and the beginning balance of the month you plan on recording in the printout of the cash register corresponds. Well, that was not the case. So that meant, no recording of the cash register for March, but instead I had to check, when did that difference occur and is it a single entry error or do multiple errors make up the difference. That's a work I'm pretty much used do. It's basic stuff for an experienced accountant and I have to say it's something I actually enjoy doing. But of course there was another thing that I had to take into consideration, and that was the way on how to correct the error in case it should have already occurred earlier in the year, especially if it's in a period when the "old" accounting year is already closed up.
So I started comparing the accounts according to the software with the printout of the cash register and that starting in January 2015. But after a couple of hours I found the difference. IT consisted of 2 errors. The first error didn't really bother me. It was a recording error of 1 cent and that was easily corrected. But there was still quite a difference and I finally found it at the beginning of October 2015. There was an error at the beginning balance. While the September end balance of the cash register and the software account matched, the beginning balance on the cash register did not match. But that was an quite easy fix as well. But it did tell me an important thing. The girl that did helped out with accounting before me hadn't cross checked the balances according to cash register and accordion to software account. If she had done that she would have seen the discrepancy right away. But it's always a great feeling when you figure out the difference and how to correct it without making yourself even more work.
When I told the CFO he was happy about that as well. And he thought that it was great that this discrepancy occurred to me right away. Told him that I do have the necessary experience in my job and that it doesn't bother me to locate differences. And that was part of the reason the hired me, since it is part of my job to go through the entire accounting data an see if everything is according to rules and regulations or if there are things that I would do differently. And it's part of my job to point things like that out.
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