Audit Assistant Review

I work on audits as an assistant, so I perform audit work on all planning, testing and completion stages of audits. I complete process notes, controls, and also test sections such as purchases, sales, treasury, and more. I liase with clients to obtain back up information like invoices to help with my testing and provide evidence.

I have learned about how a set of accounts are set out and what needs to be tested in order to audit them. I have become a lot more familiar with excel, as we often use it in our day to day work - functions such as VLOOKUP and pivot tables especially.

I enjoy it as it allows me to work and study at the same time (I am currently studying ACA and have just finished Level 4 AAT). I get 'study time' off work where I can fully focus on revising and completing exams then continue performing work on audits when I am back in work.

Quite organised - in terms of exams we get given a timetable of dates which list our tuition, revision and exam allocations. These dates could be given to us earlier, we get them around 9 months in advance. In terms of work, our resourcing manager updates our resourcing website so we can see exactly which clients we are working on certain days and see if we have any training booked also.

We get some support - for exams we mainly get support from our training provider bpp as they are the ones who have more knowledge. For work though, we have lots of teams and lots of senior colleagues we could go to to ask questions. We receive a lot of coaching whilst working on audit engagements which is helpful.

We receive a lot of support - we are given emails as a way to contact our tutors so we can ask them for help when we are stuck. We also have achievement steps to complete before the exam, these help monitor how much we know and allows us to see which areas we need to focus on.

It helps a lot, especially audit exams help me because I work in audit. Other exams help too, such as my first lot of bookkeeping exams gave me the basics I needed to know in regards to accounting. I recently sat some tax exams which aren't that relevant to my work in audit, but would be for someone who worked in tax.

Yes, we have a lot of activities - in lockdown we had a lot of virtual activities available too such as virtual quiz, virtual bake off. In normal circumstanes we would usually have a social activity once a week on a Friday night where we could go to a pub after work and socialise with one another.

No

None of my friends would be interested in accounting or professional services that KPMG offer. KPMG is great in terms of apprenticeship as they put you through your exams whilst paying you a full time salary. However, there is a lot of work to do and a lot of work will be expected to take place outside of working hours which is a downside.

You need to learn to be extremely organised as doing exams and working full time can get stressful and very time consuming so in order to meet deadlines, organisation is key. Also be prepared to work longer hours than you expect to especially during busy season. It can be a stressful job, but there are a lot of positives too.