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INTERNSHIP REPORT FIRST WEEK: You would think that three years of school, half a dozen accounting classes and about thirty business courses would prepare someone pretty well for an accounting internship. While I will admit that I may have missed a few classes, I doubt that is why my time at R. C. Maheshwari & Associates taught me more about accounting and business than anything I have taken in college . I worked on New Horizon project and done tax returns & tally. I helped in recording receipt voucher, payment voucher, sales voucher and purchase voucher.
When purchase goods attracting different rates of VAT, we have to create different purchase ledgers consisting of different tax rates. e. g. purchase@4%, purchase@12. 5%, purchases@1% separately and have to create different Input VAT ledgers consisting of different rates. When we enter the vouchers in purchase, we can select the required purchase ledger. e. g. purchases@12. 5% and record. Regarding the Input VAT ledgers we can select the required Input VAT ledger (e. g. Input VAT@12. 5%) that comes under the concerned purchases.
I had a huge variety of experiences and was fortunate to get the opportunity to work with so many different (and extremely talented) people. But the most important part of all this is that I was asked to do important tasks and given challenging assignments across this broad spectrum of experiences. That is what sets R. C. Maheshwari apart for me, and it is what made my internship special –R. C. Maheshwari & Associates will challenge you to take on as much as you can, even if it means making mistakes the first time around. SECOND WEEK:
With little over a week under my belt at R. C. Maheshwari, Abishek took me out on a 401K plan audit where I have done vouching to make sure the plan had accurate records of participants and had followed the plan document in allocations, loans and other issues. I asked Abishek a lot of questions about why we did certain things, and even more questions that had nothing to do with the part I was working on at all. Each time Abishek made sure I understood his answers, and that I grasped the whole process instead of just telling me how to do my part.
As we worked, issues came up that needed the controller’s clarification, and after our first set of questions, Abishek just told me to go ask about any issues I had on my own. I thought it was really trusting of him to let the new intern just ask what I felt was appropriate, and while it may shock those with cubes near mine, I became a bit unsure about myself raising issues about the plan with a controller who had nearly forty years in age on me.
I also was fortunate enough to get the opportunity to do substantial work on a DASSANI TRANSPOWER audit with Abishek and Mukesh, and I completed significant portions of the audit program, especially on the assets portion. It was really neat to work on a small entity, because I really got a feel for how each part of the financial statements gets audited, assets & liabilities, revenue and expenses. The company deals in electrical goods like invertor, etc,..
It sells its goods throughout India and possess a good reputation in the market. The company turnover is about 25 crores. I have done cash, credit and bank vouching. Cash book is maintained to account for receipts and payments of cash. We should see that all the receipts have been recorded in the cash book. The vouchers should be arranged in chronological order. For bank vouching we have to take a reconciliation statement for every month so that we can check whether the balance transferred is proper or not.
Yet again I found myself learning quite a bit about a topic that I knew nothing about before coming to R. C. Maheshwari! THIRD WEEK: Another assignment that I spent considerable time on was doing vouching for Arihant Power lines, which sharpened my balance sheet skills and taught me about the different types of strategies to be done in the businesses. The company manufactures electronic goods and it sells its products all over India. The company turnover is about 20 crores. I have done cash, credit and ank vouching. Cash book is maintained to account for receipts and payments of cash. We should see that all the receipts have been recorded in the cash book. The vouchers should be arranged in chronological order. For bank vouching we have to take a reconciliation statement for every month so that we can check whether the balance transferred is proper or not. I have filed income tax returns for the year 2009-10. The IT returns must be filed every year month before 13th of the preceeding month.
While it did not seem to be a great assignment when it was given, I think it was a good exercise because in the future I might work with a client and with the knowledge I have gained I may be able to help them find ways to save taxes or procure financing through some niche program. I had to interact with various vendors and express concerns about their programs, explain what we needed to salespeople who would call, and finally express an opinion about what I felt was the best option.
In the interim, I also learned quite a bit about what Company does, and began to realize the possible cost savings and efficiency gains that could be made by clients outsourcing services or buying materials from overseas. I really think that R. C. Maheshwari Associates could be a tremendous asset in the future, because as time passes the world only becomes more integrated. The accountants can provide a lot of valuable services, especially in the areas of currency risks and credit evaluation.
The Tax Department also supplied me with several learning opportunities this summer. Mukesh gave me a great assignment when he presented me a tax file, and told me todo local returns. While I learnt carryforwards and carrybacks from Abishek, I had little idea how these were actually used to generate refunds. Mukesh just let me take a crack at it and see what I could figure out, which probably created a ton of headaches for me, but it gave me the opportunity to really understand the forms and I also learned Go System Tax pretty well.
Mukesh made sure I wasn’t totally lost, but he let me learn my own way, and that really helped me understand both where the numbers come from and how moving different numbers to different places affected the amount of tax. It was a great learning experience for me, and though I may have bit off more than I could chew in trying to do the IT returns, I know a lot more about corporate income taxes just from doing this one return (Maybe it has to do with the fact it took me two and a half days also. ). I have found queries of different kinds for all the companies for which the auditor had made the required rectification.
FOURTH WEEK: My internship was not all work and no play though. The events and opportunities put together were well planned, well executed, and very beneficial to me personally. The journal was a good idea not so much that I wanted to write what I had been doing in there, but that it made me think about my weeks as a whole and get some perspective, rather than be upset at something I screwed up on Monday and happy about something I did right on Wednesday. Our intern meetings were also a good way to see if I was having the same successes and failures as the other interns.
The social side of R. C. Maheshwari & Company was perhaps the biggest surprise to me. Recruiting material had talked about how the employees cared about each other and had fun doing things together, but many firms would make such claims. I found that these were not just tag lines in a glossy brochure, but rather they were real relationships between the people who fill our office. I enjoyed the softball games, happy hours . Our events, planned or spontaneous, really made me feel like I fit in here, that R. C. Maheshwari was sort of an extended family.
That is the kind of thing is not reflected in one’s salary or office size – but rather it is reflected in the mirror, because people smile when they are happy to go to work at R. C. Maheshwari & Associates. I found myself happy to go to work each day, and with my college lifestyle I would not have believed that was possible, but our people made it possible. As I proofread and revised this paper, I recognized that I demonstrated poor English by changing perspective from “I” to “Our” in the middle of this paper.
But as I went to change it, I realized that perhaps that transition represents the transition that I made while working here. Initially R. C. Maheshwari was just an accounting firm that I worked at, sometimes on good projects, sometimes on bad. But as I worked more closely with the people here, I began to realize that we were something special. That we would get as many opportunities as our hearts desire and our skills could meet. I realized that our culture was what set us apart, and that the greatest assets R. C. Maheshwari & Associates held were not on the books, but rather in the seats.