Graduate Blog

Kate - Assurance Cork

Hi Everyone,

Apologies I haven’t been in touch sooner! The last fortnight has been super busy as I was working in Dublin and studying for the CAP2 SFMA Continuous Assessment that we sat last Saturday. The exam itself went ok, as always with the exams it was pretty tight for time but luckily I think everyone was pretty prepared going in to it!

I am only back in Cork today for the first time since before Christmas as I took the first week in January off and then went straight to Dublin. It was great getting to work away for a while as I had never been on a Dublin job before nor had I spent that much time in the City. Although we were pretty busy it was nice to get to meet people from the Dublin office and work for the different managers.

Now I’m back in Cork I’m looking forward to getting back into the office to catch up with everyone again but that’ll have to wait until next week as I’m out on site this week again down in Cobh, Co. Cork!

Talk soon,

Kate

Aoife – Tax Dublin

Hi All

It has been a while since I updated my blog so I wanted to give you a taste of what has been happening in the tax department of PwC over the past few weeks.

Firstly, the Budget took place in early December. This was a great opportunity to get in touch with our clients and keep them up to date on the changes that would affect them. PwC had a large media presence on Budget night and the following days whereby we explained to clients and the public what the budget changes would mean for them. The tax department of PwC hosts a Budget Breakfast Briefing in the Four Seasons on the morning after the Budget which clients are invited to attend. This was the first year that I was involved in the Budget Briefing and it was a great way to meet clients face to face and chat informally about the Budget and how business is going for them generally.

We have had some more interesting training sessions recently including a session on Intellectual Property. Such sessions give us a good overview of an area so that we are in a position to have initial discussions with clients about a topic that may be relevant to them. We have a number of training sessions scheduled for the coming weeks also.

The run-up to Christmas is always a very enjoyable few weeks in PwC. The atmosphere is lively and the decorations around the office really add to the festive season. Our DIO Christmas party was a thoroughly enjoyable day. Our department went for a delicious lunch followed by a karaoke session! The karaoke machine didn't get a rest all night! There were many surprise performances on the night and lots of hidden talent emerged!! Next stop will be the X Factor!!

I am involved in a Corporate Social Responsibility project whereby I am part of a team that helps a wonderful school on Pearse Street called The Life Centre. This small school caters for teenagers preparing for the Junior Cert. We organise some projects for the teenagers which are fun yet challenging. This year, we are facilitating a Dragon's Den-style project whereby the students prepare a proposal for a business idea. We assist the students in preparing their pitches to potential investors. It is very encouraging to see their confidence increase over the weeks of practice. In May each year, we invite the students to our office in Spencer Dock to present their proposal for four "Dragons" who are PwC colleagues that the students have not met before. The Life Centre collaboration has been running for a number of years now and it is a very rewarding experience for both students, teachers and those of us involved from PwC.

January is quite a busy month here in the tax practice. We are currently carrying out tax reviews which involves reviewing or providing the corporation tax figure for inclusion in a company's financial statements. I have been involved in some small tax reviews carried out from the office over the past 2 weeks. Next week, I will be visiting a client in Maynooth for an all-day onsite tax review. I will be accompanied by an Assistant and a Specialist 2. We intend to spend the day analysing the information provided and continue our review from the office the following week before producing a draft corporation tax computation for audit of tax sign-off purposes. This is the first year that I will be co-ordinating this review. I will be working directly with the Director and delegating to and assisting the Junior staff-I am looking forward to the challenge.

Bye for now

Aoife

Maura – Assurance Dublin

Hi,

Again, apologies for the delay in entries. I seem to have had a very busy period now that I'm taking the time to reflect. I completed my training of the Associates and found the second week was even more enjoyable than the first. In the second week there was a definite shift in the dynamic of the Associate group as people adapted to their new environment and became more familiar with their new colleagues. The social night at the end of the course was Casino themed, it was a great night but alas I was better at losing chips than winning them!

After the training course, I returned to work on a client that I had done some interim work on earlier in the year. I was assigned to this job for five weeks. I was given responsibility for multiple sections of the file including Research, deferred income, journals testing and review of the financial statements to name but a few. I gained some great experience on this job including assisting the Senior Manager with the preparation of the board reports and I gained some experience with US GAAP financial accounting treatments. This was my fourth year to work on this client and I really felt that as a more senior member of the team, I had great insight into the client's operations. It was a large team so there were plenty of opportunities to coach and be coached. Toward the end of the job there were some late nights so we would be able to sign the accounts on time but thankfully I was able to put some of the overtime toward my three weeks off at Christmas!

I came back after Christmas feeling totally refreshed and eagerly anticipating the busy season ahead. For my first week, I was located in the office which gave me a nice chance to catch up on my emails and voicemails. I also used the opportunity to document some planning work for a job I will be working on later in the year.

I am now working on the largest client that I work on during the year. It is a PLC client and this is my second year to work on the job. There is a team of 7 people continuously on site and the managers and partner regularly join us on site to perform their reviews and engage in meetings with the client as necessary. The audit is very much at its early stages and I am gathering information so that I am fully conversant with the client's Revenue operations as I am auditing this section. I have been setting up meetings with various client staff so I can begin documenting my testing. I will keep you posted on how the rest of the job goes.

Bye for now,
Maura

Brian – Tax Dublin

Happy New Year everyone and I hope the holidays were fun! 2011 flew by and was, fortunately, a great year! I’m now back in the office after what felt like the shortest break ever.

It was very busy in the weeks leading up to the holidays since we are in the middle of the Capital Gains Tax compliance season – ensuring that individuals remain tax compliant and advising people on how to dispose of their assets in a tax efficient manner. In general our department was much busier last year than previous years which reflects how the firm is holding up against external market pressures.

The recent 2012 budget ensured that we were also busy writing reports for many of the national newspapers as well as preparing budget calculators for PwC’s website which has been very popular. Many of the senior members of my department were also out and about discussing the impacts of Budget 2012.

There will be some new Co-Ops starting in our department soon who remain with us for much of the year.

My lectures will recommence this week and will run right through to the beginning of July. I will also have two weeks off work to attend Block Release lectures so it will be nice/ not so nice to have a week off from work to attend all day lectures. It’s a tough balance but since there are so many others in the same position it’s not as bad! The firm has been preparing us well for the FAE exams at the beginning of September with lots of advice, guidance and tips on how to be successful, so fingers crossed!

Chat again soon!

Sarah – Consulting Dublin

Hi everyone,

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been working off-site mainly developing the ‘to-be’ process maps for the future system our team is designing. We recently walked through these with the client and I updated the process maps during the workshops we held.

In addition to this, I participated in a stakeholder and communications workshop last month and over the following weeks I assisted in developing and finalising our stakeholder and communications plan which was sent to the client two weeks ago.

Apart from the project I am working on, I have also been doing some business development work where I have been developing new content for the People and Change side of the Consulting website. So, I’ve been kept really busy since I last wrote.

As I am finishing up for the Christmas tomorrow this will be my last blog until 2012! We have our Christmas party tomorrow night which I’m really looking forward to...I have heard there will be an awards ceremony and possibly karaoke so I’m sure it will be a great night!

Have a great Christmas and I’ll write again in the New Year!

Sarah

Catherine – Assurance South East

Hi all,

This will be my last blog before Christmas and before the hectic busy season of 2012 commences in work. I was on training the week before last for two days, as part of our contract we are continuously updated on area’s which we will be working on in the coming year. My exposure to the audit of funds is limited as our office does not really deal with them however it was really interesting to learn about some new area’s such as the pricing of funds and capital stocks.

After that I started on the interim audit of one of our offices largest manufacturing clients. I also worked on the audit of this client last year and again in August of this year for our interim controls testing. It’s nice to go back to see some familiar faces at the clients offices. I was there for a week in total and essentially we started our audit work by looking at the clients’ trial balance up to the end of November. This allows us to reduce the amount of work we will have to do in January as there is a very tight reporting deadline that we have to meet without group auditors in the United States. I was working on some new areas this year on the job as well such as looking at sales contracts in place with customers and intercompany transaction testing. I also had to explain to one of the new associates about some of the area’s that I has worked on last year and this is a really new thing for me to be passing on some of the knowledge I have learned since I started over 12 months ago to those who are now in the position I was in when I first started. It’s a really interesting aspect to the work as it really makes you think about the work when you have to explain to another person the reasons why you are doing the particular audit testing for example.

We have our regional Christmas party to look forward to now on Friday in Kilkenny. The three offices from the South East, Wexford, Waterford and Kilkenny will all be coming together for dinner and I’m sure what will be a great night catching up with everyone from the other offices!

Until next time I hope you all have a lovely Christmas...

Catherine

Kate - Assurance Cork

Hi everyone,

Sorry for not posting this blog sooner, the last fortnight has been hectic! As I mentioned the last time, I had a stock-take to attend in Rome for one of our large pharmaceutical clients. This whole experience was really enjoyable and extremely interesting. I was counting inventory that was located in huge warehouses! One of these warehouses was completely automatically operated which meant there was machinery operating itself in and out of the warehouse picking up and delivering inventory items to wherever the request had been generated, it was fantastic to get to see its day to day operation!

Since last week, I’ve been out of the office and for the next fortnight will be working on the interim audit of another pharmaceutical company! This is the first job I’ve been involved in for the second year and it really is crazy seeing the work I completed last year and explaining to the associate what I did!

I’ll be in touch again before Christmas!

Talk soon,

Kate

Aoife – Tax Dublin

Hi all,

It has been a busy few weeks in the DIO unit. With December approaching, year end is on the agenda for a lot of our clients. This is a good time to speak with clients on various planning ideas which may be of interest to them.

In my last post, I mentioned that I visited a large multinational client together with the Partner and Manager on the job and we discussed a number of tax planning ideas that we felt were very relevant to this particular client. The client has decided to proceed with one such re-structuring idea and I have been busy assisting on this over the past few weeks. I have had a number of further meetings and conference calls with various individuals within the client's team who have different responsibilities with regard to implementing the proposal, together with the client's legal advisors. From the PwC side, I have had interaction with the VAT unit and Company Secretarial unit, both of whom are assisting us on this project. This is a good way of building relationships with those in other units who I do not work with on a daily basis.

I have also attended a meeting with a smaller client who has seen their business grow over the past year. Their projections for FY12 are positive and the client is hoping to implement some planning ideas in the new year so that their tax affairs are structured as efficiently as possible. I look forward to working with this client over the coming weeks. Hearing about the successful year the client has just had and their plans for expansion is definitely a good news story and very encouraging.

Over the past few weeks, we have had a number of training sessions on specific topics such as the Research and Development (R&D) regime in Ireland and Succession Planning. These internal sessions are delivered by our in-house specialists in this area and give us a good basis on which to have a discussion with clients. We have also recently been updated on developments in the corporate tax regime in the UK and how these changes might benefit our clients.

A firm briefing was recently given by our Senior Partner, Ronan Murphy. All staff of the Dublin office were invited to the Convention Centre and we were updated on all aspects of the firm and reminded of various highlights experienced by PwC over the past year of which to be proud. At the event prizes for "Above and Beyond" were also awarded. This is an award whereby staff can nominate their colleagues for achievements in various aspects of client service.

As the Budget will be announced next Tuesday, the tax practice will have a very busy week briefing clients on various changes arising from the proposals.

Until the next time,

Aoife

Catherine – Assurance South East

Hi All,

Since my last blog I’ve been working on a number of different jobs. These have included both audited and unaudited companies and I’m also currently working on the accounts preparation of my first set of secondary school accounts, brings back school memories when I see references to school principals!

I was up in PwC’s Dublin office as well last week. As I placed 7th in my CAP 2 exams I went up to have a photo taken for the national papers with all of the other people who were placed in their exams this year with PwC. It was definitely a different side to my working day posing for the camera and then seeing it in the newspapers a couple of days later...whoever said an accountant’s life is boring obviously never worked with PwC!

I’m back in the office now this week, we only have a few more weeks left until the Christmas break so I’m trying to tie up some of the loose ends of jobs I’ve been working on so that when I get back from my Christmas break it’s full steam ahead for my second busy season!

Until my next blog...thanks for reading!

Adam – Consulting Dublin

Hi All,

Apologises for the gap in entries but I have been on study leave for the last 3 weeks! As you know I am studying towards my CIMA qualification and last week I sat the P2 and F2 examinations. The exams were tough but I’m hopeful that I did enough to get through! The results aren’t out till January so I will enjoy Christmas before I start worrying about them!

I finished up on my previous job before my study leave. It was a busy week trying to tidy up loose ends and get the report completed before I finished but thankfully everything went according to plan and the report was completed on time!

I’m currently in the office and I’m unassigned. This means that I am not assigned to a job at the moment. I have plenty of work to keep me busy though as I have to complete appraisals for my last two jobs. I’m also helping out with the website for our team which I’m really looking forward to being involved with as it’s an area I have no experience in.

It’s great being back in the office particularly with Christmas fast approaching! Everyone is already getting excited about the Christmas party and then there is the “unofficial” 12 pubs Christmas party that is on the week beforehand!

I shall keep you all updated!

Chat soon,
Adam