The Chronicles of an Audit Associate
I am a first-generation CA student. Everything I have done to reach this stage has been thanks to the support of my family and the guidance of my friends, professors, colleagues and bosses. I have also been helped by a million unknown people with whom I have crossed paths unknowingly.
Penning down this essay on Medium is my way of giving back to the universe. It may seem narcissistic to think that merely reading this essay will be of help to another CA student. Yet, I do hope this essay brings to the reader the same amount of support and guidance I have received in these three years.
Orientation:
The journey from being a naïve 12th grader/undergraduate to becoming a world-class professional is certainly difficult. Changing your mindset is a prerequisite. The Indian education system, save a few good schools/curricula, mainly focus on mindless memorisation of facts and snap-of-a-finger recall. None of this will ever equip you for anything that you experience in your articleship. The duration of the transition period from your first day at work, to being able to manage your work independently is inversely proportionate to how street-smart you are and directly proportional to your bookish-smarts.
I do not wish to scare you away. To be honest, even if you are not street-smart (I wasn’t either), there’s no reason to fear. Only the transition period will be slightly longer, and you’ll be able to catch up during the remainder of your articleship period.
The first year:
As a first-year associate at a Big 4, I felt pretty damn scared. It was my first ever job. It was the first time I’d spent so much time merely commuting daily to and from a place. Navigating through large and posh corporate offices made me feel tiny and awkward. There wasn’t much going for me, besides my better-than-average typing speed (averaging 65 wpm) and decent Excel skills (or so I thought). I could even hold my own while drafting an email. But a few minutes after I walked in through that door on my first assignment, I realised I had absolutely no skills to help me get through a single day.
Since the work I was assigned hadn’t completely arrived at my table yet, I was assigned to do some basic data entry for another senior. I vaguely remember looking at her hands flying off the keyboard in a frenzy. She used Excel like a pro. Right up to that day, I never believed in using Excel shortcuts, and hence hadn’t memorised any. But when I saw her magically wave her hands and create Pivots out of nowhere, I realised it was time for me to buckle up and do the one thing I hate the most: rote memorisation. However, luckily, a senior article in the team gave me a life hack: Use the Alt key instead, follow the instructions on the screen and press each alphabet one after another. Do it often enough and you’ll end up memorising those too. And sure enough, Alt+N+V became my best friend pretty soon.
Another thing that struck me on my first day at the job was how self-assured my seniors seemed when they did their work. They didn’t have to consult anyone to find out what to do after completing each step. I wondered, if, and when, I would ever reach that stage.
Another thing no one tells you about your first entry-level job in auditing is the number of times you go to the washroom just to have a good cry. Again, to bring in my love for proportional-based analogies: the number of times you cry is inversely proportional to how good a senior/manager you have. In the entire first year, I remember spending one whole month crying every day in the washroom, and a quarter where I barely cried once during the entire busy season. I was hesitant to tell my colleagues about my “weakness” because back then, I didn’t know that crying in the bathroom was a common phenomenon. And because I felt that I was the only weak one in my team, my self-confidence reached an all-time low. In my second year, when I was more comfortable with my colleagues, I confided in them about my crying incidents, and they opened up to me about their bathroom-crying sessions as well. Even though this kind of normality is frowned upon outside of audit, hearing that crying was a common way to spend your first year felt like a relief.
I overcame a lot of fears in this first year as well. By nature, I am too introverted when I meet new people. It takes me months to get close to someone and open myself up. My worst nightmare came true when, for a few assignments, I was plotted under different senior associates every week to help them achieve deadlines. I ended up showing up at those assignments with the mindset of a contract labourer — just get the work done and go home. However, the manager on one of these assignments called me out on my attitude. The reason for this was that on Day one, I did not inform anyone that I hadn’t carried any lunch along with me, nor did I ask anyone what the canteen scene at the client's office was until it was too late. She told me that I need to be bolder and that no one could read my mind. This moment was akin to the turning point on a stock market’s bear run. Slowly and steadily, I started implementing her advice and felt myself change. One day I told my friend about my love for developing macros and showed a few macros that I had made for time-pass, and somehow that ended up with me being noticed by a Director in the team. Eventually, in my second year, I ended up going on a three-week-long outstation audit with a senior I had never worked with before getting my boarding pass. Yet, I ended up becoming super good friends with her in those three weeks.
The first year went by, and I gradually became a pro at Excel. I also became a pro at figuring things out by looking at SALY (for the non-audit crowd, SALY means ‘same as last year’. It’s a practice of referring to the previous year’s workpaper and understanding how to complete the current year’s work and document it in the workpaper). There were still a lot of things left for me to learn, and my cushion of “just being in my first year” was running thin. Those responsibilities which I had been able to shirk off by dumping tough things off on my seniors were starting to grin at me from behind corners. Nevertheless, I enjoyed my first year as it was a year of many firsts: the first year of cold calling people, the first year of working late nights, the first year of outstation audits and staying in five-star hotels, the first year of understanding what exactly I had signed up for, the first year of not cracking a book open yet learning every day.
The second year:
In my second year as an article, I started taking on more responsibility. On one of the clients I was plotted on, I was the only staff working on it along with my manager. I was learning so much at work, that I kept my CA Final studies on the sidelines. I ended up bunking classes because I had to work on weekends, and I did it without any regrets. I spent time learning how to make a cash flow statement hands-on instead of listening to a boring professor ramble about cash flow statements in a cramped, overcrowded classroom. I also made an effort to remember things from work, so that I could recall them later on during my study leave. Further, planning my work and doing it seamlessly started to come easily to me. My fear of not being able to work unassisted seemed unfounded now. My fingers found their place on the right keys subconsciously.
The second year was also the year when I started understanding the dynamics of a team and appreciating how the so-called “office-politics” works. By my own admission, I am a dodo when it comes to interpersonal relations. Sure, I am not a complete idiot, but the patterns don’t materialise in my understanding immediately. I may realise a month or two later why a certain person said or did a certain thing at that specific time. Obviously, I did learn from the experiences and apply them to future situations. But that interim period when I didn’t have this knowledge caused me to make more mistakes which seemed difficult to repair in the future (nothing serious, I assure you).
I also started understanding the pressure that everyone faces when working in an Audit department of a Big 4. Deadlines started making more sense to me. In my first year, I was always someone else’s responsibility, so deadlines didn’t directly affect me. But in the second year, it was an unsaid expectation for me to be responsible for getting work done in time for a review. The first time a manager asked me to set a deadline for myself, I was stumped. Mistakenly, I ended up overestimating my ability and then disaster struck: I took more time to get the work done, which had a snowball effect on everyone else’s timelines. After that, a senior told me that the trick is to always add a cushion time to the deadline to cover for unforeseen eventualities.
Another important lesson I learned was to start reading up on relevant accounting and auditing standards before being assigned a task. Or at least read a brief introduction or summary to it. The reason behind this is not to merely help you to complete the CA final syllabus brick-by-brick. Reading up on material may also help you see your work from a different perspective in real-time, and then you are in a position to offer opinions to your seniors and managers which may end up being useful to them while forming a conclusion on an audit point. Further, they will be impressed by your dedication and will make sure that you are gainfully occupied during your articleship period (which is something I’ve heard other articles struggle with during their three years).
The third year:
The third year was finally my time to shine. Like a pearl ready to be shown off by its oyster, I was ready. Though my third year was cut short by my study leave and the postponement of CA exams, I think I enjoyed my third year the most. It was finally the time for me to put into action all the things I had learned during my 2.5 years. Whenever I cracked open my Audit textbook, I ended up feeling a wave of nostalgia, as I finally understood the root of the many rules and instructions my managers had given me. My Financial Reporting textbook seemed like a piece of cake thanks to all the hands-on experience. My limited exposure to tax audits helped me grasp concepts slightly faster. Most importantly, my brain had grown much more than what it was when I cleared my Intermediate CA examination. I found myself being able to link concepts, develop hypotheticals and answer them somewhat correctly. I do not regret not studying enough during my articleship, because I’m sure it would have made absolutely no difference. My learnings stemmed from the time I spent doing the actual job, conversing with my seniors about accounting and auditing concepts, and filling checklists which helped me understand procedures. The long nights suddenly made sense.
I learned another important lesson of looking at the bigger picture. It’s easy to get bogged down and feel constrained to the specific area of the audit that you are assigned. But taking a few minutes every day to understand how my work formed part of the final deliverable really helped me. If my contribution wasn’t clear enough to me, I’d ask my seniors for their opinion. These realisations helped me stay motivated during these three grueling years.
Exit Formalities
Despite all the ups and downs in these three years, I will always look back at my articleship experience fondly. The person I am today is truly an amalgamation of all the brilliant people I’ve met in my blossoming career. I am and will always be eternally grateful to all the managers I’ve worked with during these three years. Thanks to them and their belief in me, I have been transformed from a scared teenager to a confident 22-year-old. I also take great pride in the role I have played in helping my juniors overcome their professional obstacles. I have made an impact and I sleep better at night knowing this.
I will always remember the managers and seniors :
who organised a birthday party for me atthe office despite knowing me for only a week;
who realised that I was crying because I felt scared and dejected that I couldn’t complete my work on time unlike the other associates in my team, and who then proceeded to take an impromptu team snack break and ensured that I left the canteen with a smile on my face;
who listened to me when I broke down and cried about how I had been having a tough time and made the necessary changes to ensure that I never felt that way again;
who gave me the reins to step up and take charge of assignments when everyone else in the team was new to the work;
who made sure that I was eating well and sleeping well before asking if I was working well;
who made me feel involved and took time to listen to my opinion on significant areas of the audit work;
who made working from home as seamless as working from the office;
who saw the potential in me when I couldn’t see it myself.
If you’re reading this, I hope you know the impact you’ve had on my life. Thank you for everything.
