Professional trainees: Dale Robinson - Case study
 |  | Name: Dale Robinson Age: 20 Department: Audit Office: Lancashire |
Client
Company A is a building firm operating as a partnership of Mr X and Mrs Y. The firm generates an annual turnover of £148,275 and their financial year runs from 1 April 2002 to 31 March 2003.The Team
I was working in a team of three, made up of the partner responsible for the client, a third year trainee, and a first year trainee (myself). As this was really the first time I had worked through the full process of producing a set of accounts, I received quite a bit of help and training, from both the partner and the third year trainee.The Job
As this was a new experience for me the partner took me slowly through the process of producing a set of accounts. The first task was to go through the background of the client and to study last year’s accounts.
Next I received the client’s books and records, including the sales daybook, purchase daybook, wages & VAT book, bank statements, etc. From these I started to produce the control accounts and working papers.
Once I had produced each of the control accounts, I found there was quite a big difference on the purchase ledger control. I discussed the problem with the partner and eventually was able to reduce the difference to £148. As there was only one employee in the business I found it easy to prepare a wages control account, which balanced at the first attempt.
Once all of the control accounts seemed in order I needed to set up various schedules, like a fixed asset schedule, debtors & creditors schedules, and stock schedule. I found this quite tricky so I received help from the third year trainee.
The main part of working out the debtors amount is looking at the prepayments to see how many months have already been paid for in the next financial year. The creditors schedule was much easier as there weren’t any calculations to work out.
Once I had the control accounts and different schedules together, it was a matter of posting the figures to an accounts computer program to produce a draft set of accounts. The third year trainee was very helpful during this process.
The first task when posting was to go through the working papers and mark down nominal codes in red pen next to each figure. From here I used, ‘Sage Accounts Production Advanced’, to post the figures to a trial balance as either a debit or credit balance.
The only difficult thing I found here was deciding if the particular balances were debits or credits, but again help was at hand, if I had any problems, from the third year trainee who then helped me to produce and post a list of adjustments.
I had finally finished the original set of posting and it was time to print off a draft copy of the accounts. I then compared the current year’s figures to the previous year to see if there were any glaring differences. It was then a matter of filing the accounts along with the working papers, ready to hand back to the partner.
From here the partner set up a meeting with the client to discuss the accounts. This meeting brought up some final adjustments which needed to be made, which were carried out using the Sage program. A final set of accounts was printed off and then sent out for the client to sign.
Overall I spent about five days on the job, but was taken through the full process of producing a set of accounts by the partner and the third year trainee.
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