So I posted earlier about how I was trying out an account with Zecco.com. They advertised free stock trades, which I thought was really cool. It seemed great at first, and now I am a bit confused and pissed off.

A couple weeks ago I tried to log on the see how my stocks were doing. It wouldn’t let me in. I am positive I am putting the right password in, but it won’t work. I haven’t been able to call them about it because of being at work so much, but I will call them soon.

So today, I got an email from them saying that now, in order to get 10 free trades a month, you need to have $25,000 in your account with them! That is ridiculous, as they originally got people in like me, who can’t even spare $1000 as a minimum to invest with other sites.

So now I’m wonderng if this is why I can’t log into my account. Also, I realized that I can’t sell the shares I currently have without getting charged a trading fee, which is probably something like $12 a trade because that is what other discount sites offer.

Okay, so if they need to charge for trades to function, fine, but I’m mad that they advertised it as free, and have basically taken $100 of my money, and will charge me to get it back. Damn them!

Photo of Atlanta - by Nrbelex @ Flickr

Today was another long one… I left work at 8:45 (my senior was still there, reading over the stuff I’ve done all week), and there were all these PEOPLE on the road. Who even does that? Go home at a decent time people!

Today was not nearly so bad as yesterday. I didn’t feel as rushed to get stuff done, although that’s because I stayed until 8:45 instead of 4:30 like yesterday, haha. I’m excited that tomorrow is the last day, but honestly, I’ve gotten SO MUCH experience this week. I can’t even remember what I’ve done…

I tested operating expense, rent expense, journal entries, tied out the Japanese and US balance sheets, did an interest analytic (which I maybe messed up a bit, but not enough to matter)… So much stuff!

Business jargon is weird for me… I’ve never really been one to use slang terms, and business jargon is essentially the slang of the work-world. But people are forever refering to “tieing things out,” and I never really realize that’s what I’m doing. The way I think of it, I’m just making sure some numbers match.

Tomorrow is time for another evaluation!! Oh dear… and bagels! I almost forgot. My job for the morning is to fetch bagels on the way to the client. My life is very glamorous!!

Photo by annia316 @ flickr

I’m not the type of person who can consistently function on 4-5 hours sleep. I need my full 7-8 hours, or I get grumpy and sick. Can I actually work in audit if I’m like this?

Update: Closer to the end of my internship, I realized that this actually does get better with practice!!

This week basically has longer hours than I’ve had to work before, and I’m tired. I know that full-time workers, and even some of the other interns are working longer hours though. One of the other interns has worked over 70 hours in a week before!

Part of the stress is suddenly having a whole lot to do, and not feeling like I know how to do it. It’s nice to have a lot of work, but if I’m busy, then you know that my senior is 100 times busier, and it can be hard to ask questions.

I imagine this kind of stress also goes away with time, as this is the first client where I’ve really had to do work without someone holding my hand while I do it.

This week, my client is what google maps tells me is an hour and half drive from my house.

I can do the drive 1 hour and 15 minutes if I leave during a lull in traffic, and every day I get braver driving on the highway. I think that that highway is a bit scary because the lanes are narrower than usual.

This is my first client where I’m expected to work long hours. My first few weeks, my seniors wanted me working as little as possible, I think, as everyone is paying more attention to budgets this year. This week I have some more responsibility, i.e. I get left alone here a lot more than at other offices.

By the end of each week, so far, I have felt like I am figuring it out, and like I understand what’s going on. Then the next week starts. And I’m totally confused all over again! The first few weeks, I could take my time over everything, to figure it out as I go along. This week, my senior definitely expects me to be moving faster, as this is the last week of the audit.

Once this week is done, I’ll be back closer to home, and with my senior from last week, who I absolutely loved working with. I’ll be on that client for 6 weeks straight, so it should be an interesting change from having 3 different clients in my first 3 weeks!

Excel is a frequently used tool in accounting. Almost everything I do at my internship is in MS Excel. I expected this, but I didn’t really know what to learn about excel, beyond the basics, that would prepare me for this. So here are a couple of small, but super-useful things I learned in the last couple of weeks. (In addition to already having a good basic knowledge of Excel).

• Alt+Enter
  This will allow you to move down a line, but stay in the same cell. I have to use this all the time at work, because we type out long paragraphs of explanation in one cell, to explain our procedures and results.
• Vlookup function
  I knew this function existed, and I could tell when it would be useful to use, but I have always had trouble implementing it.

  Vlookup is good when you are trying to combine 2 excel tables that have one unique identifier in common. For example, 2 tables have a column with invoice numbers, but they have different information about the same invoices. These tips will probably make more sense when you actually try to use it. Just know that it is very possible you will have to use this function a lot!

1. In the table you are pulling information *from*, make sure that your unqiue id you will be looking up (invoice numbers) is in the left-most column.
2. In the Vlookup function, be sure to use $ signs to anchor your table array, if you are copying and pasting the function into a lot of cells. So if you are pulling from a table that is cells A3:N3003 for example, make sure that you type it in is $A$3:$N$3003. Otherwise, when you paste the formula, it will change the array numbers.

Have I mentioned that the client I’m currently working on is a bakery?

Right now it is busy season for auditors: the time of what I once heard referred to as “audit ass”. (Apologies for the profanity, but “audit butt” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.)

credit: sxc.hu/nosheep

So, we have little samples of cookies and cakes each day. And gorgeous pictures of pastries all over the walls.

Today we got a whole cake to split between three of us. And whoever wandered in from the office. I think we get more treats than they do, even though they work there all the time.

I have been trying to work out a little bit . . . a very little bit. Monday, I managed 10 minutes on the stationary bike, yesterday only 7 before I nearly died of boredom. Tonight I managed 20 minutes, but I wasn’t trying very hard, haha.

Well, it’s past bedtime! I slept sooo much last night though, so maybe I can skimp a bit tonight. Does it work like that?

(My apologies for the title of this post- I just thought of it. Isn’t it awful?? I had to share!)

So the first real week of work is done, and let me just say, THE SPEED LIMIT IS 45 ALONG THERE, NOT 35. One day we’re going to stop at a light, and I’m going to get out of my car and TELL you that. (Except that I’m a 5′ tall girl and I might end up dead).

I can tell you want to go faster. You drive 40, and occasionally creep up past that, but then you slam on the brakes, as you realize you’re getting too far from 35. I know you really want the speed limit to be 45, I just don’t know why you don’t read all the many speed limit signs that say 45.

So I’m going to instead figure out your license number and report you to the commuters’ board of health, because it just can’t be legal for you to act so stupid while we’re commuting, can it?

So tomorrow is my last day on this job. I haven’t actually worked enough to require an evaluation, but I want one. The problem is, before my superior can evalutate me, I have to fill out my own opinion on myself.

So, I would just mark myself average on everything, but some of the things just haven’t come up. For example: Staying positive during frustrating periods. Nothing has been frustrating this week! Or: Communicating well with clients. I’ve barely even met the clients, although we have been in their office building all week.

Some of them I haven’t done, although I could have, such as: awareness of industry and client-specific accounting. I didn’t have tons of time to prepare, as I only got this assignment Monday. It also didn’t seem as important as it would if I were working on the client for more than 4 days. Should you rank yourself lower for that kind of thing?

In order to answer these questions before my evaluation on next week’s client, I’m going to:

• Spend some time this weekend brushing up on their background information
• Work on the e-learning for the audit software we use

During the actual week, I need to make sure that I:

• Am actively seeking out work any second I am not unassigned.
• Ask more questions to show I’m interested in learning.
• Ask about how long an assignment is expected to take me, to show that I have an awareness of time budgets.

So it turns out this work thing takes up a lot of time in the day. On the plus side, I don’t really have homework to do at night, so even though I don’t have time to do anything, life isn’t as stressful as last semester!

Today was my first day on a client! It was very quiet, and luckily we are not near crunch time yet on this client. Only 3 of us were working there today, in a nice conference room all to ourselves. It was nice to have the senior right there, and a staff next to me to answer any questions.

I left early to head to the office in downtown Atlanta to meet with a partner assigned to me to be a sort of mentor. I decided to take the train, but it was slow, so when I got to the station I was planning to make it up the escalator super fast. But there was a policeman, standing correctly to one side, but apparently his dog didn’t understand the “stand on the right, walk on the left” rule, because he was standing on the left, in my way.

I considered a polite “excuse me” and then decided I could just wait.

The first week of my internship has come to a close. I have a better idea what I will be doing over the next several weeks, but still no actual experience on a job.

Our first 2 days were orientation, and we covered topics like how to enter time worked, and how much time to enter.

Wednesday, Thursday and Friday were all training in how to audit. Some of the topics came right out of the Audit class that I took in college, while some of it was specific to the firm, such as how they select their sample for monetary unit sampling. Luckily, it seems like you will always have a little calculation tool to help you with that one, as it’s fairly complicated.

Monday is one last day of training, but it is e-learnings, so if I complete them on my own, I can leave early. But probably I would stay to work on the optional e-learning about how to use their audit software! All I’ve learned this week is that there are a lot of ways to mess up, and I don’t know how to fix it if I do!