Showing me the Ropes

8/2/2013

As year-end came to a close the workload got heavier for me as the UNSW intern before me, who is currently working part-time, came back from his holiday and was able to show me the ropes. He was able to handover some of the tasks he had completed as an intern and some of them included doing quarterly ABS surveys for the company, distributing the daily mail, drafting up the monthly balance sheet, compiling all the recs and journals done by FLDP graduates, managers and management accountants, coding invoices and preparing journals to be posted into our accounting system SAP by our accounts payable amongst other ad hoc work. My accounting 1A knowledge helped me with preparing journals for invoices that needed to be paid out because I had to understand both sides of the accounting equation which involved debiting an expense and crediting an accounts payable ledger. These tasks seemed relatively simple but it involved a lot of different steps, a lot of documentation and the compilation of information from an array of sources. He explained everything clearly and I found that he was able to remember the processes and steps to each task so well because he made a manual for the majority of his tasks, as something to refer to if he ever got lost. Learning from others and picking up on of their good habits will definitely help with self-improvement and progress and that’s something I learnt and was able to adopt.

Another thing I discovered is that sometimes when someone shows you how to do something you may have understood what they have done but when it comes to doing it yourself it’s different if you haven’t had a go at it and sometimes I find myself needing to ask a second time about how I should get something done. Going forwards I believe that to cement what I’ve been told to do I should just go through a brief summary of what I need to do at the very end and actually make sure I know what I’m doing so there only needs to be one explanation.