Time flies by when you’re busy! I cannot believe that today is my 1 month anniversary at work. In a flash I completed 25% of my contract. ¼ of my working days have been concluded and as I had promised, this is the blog where I provide more details on what I’ve been doing at work and how my days have changed. I suppose we could say that this is a sequel to last year’s post: Hey, so what do you all day now that you’re not working? This time though, the question is Hey, what are your days like now that you are not working? How is the new job? Which by the way… is not so new anymore!

The company I’m working with has a different way of doing their financial analysis and accounting processes. They following Candian GAAP, which is pretty similar to US GAAP (accounting principles) but where I find the most differences is in the timing of their processes and the level of detail with which they analyze their results. For example, when I used to work at SPX, the turnaround between closing month end, preparing reports and reforecasting for the remainder of the year was pretty quick, 1 week. Everything had to be done one week after the 30th or 31st of each month. It was crazy busy and hectic for a couple weeks, but once it got sent to Wall Street, it was over. Here, the company is private and much smaller. Its main stakeholders are the founders and its employees and month end can take weeks at a time. I believe the final results for the month of March, were submitted on April 26!

One of my tasks/projects was to analyze all the operating expenses for January through March! And April is yet to come. When I was first told what I’d have to do, I thought I was going to die. They call it analyzing, but to me it’s more of a data classification and reorganization. Basically, first I make sure that all expenses were allocated to the appropriate accounts. Then, I compare them to the budget and allocate them to the categories or buckets that were established in the budget. For example, let’s say I’m looking at costs related to a conference. First I need to verify that these costs are in fact related to a conference. Next, I’d check whether we had budgeted to attend this conference or not. Then, I’d prepare a comparison to the budget showing what we had budgeted and what actually happened for this particular conference. It’s a lot of manual work, where I’m sorting and digging through tons of data. At first I thought it’d be tedious and boring, but now I realize that working with the general ledger and monthly transactions in such a great level of detail I get to learn in a great level of detail about a bunch of different accounting topics which I’m not going to mention because you’ll probably get bored reading about it.

Another one of my projects is analyzing the actual results for month end. This time analyzing being a bit more analytical then in the task mentioned above. I compare the budget to the actual results and see where we stand. Are we spending more than expected? Are we seeing potential areas for savings? What surprised me the most during this Project is that a variance as small as $500 is to be analyzed. For example, let’s say employee meals was over budget by $500. I would then investigate, why did we incur more costs, are we planning to save next month to make up for it, is it a matter of timing, or are we going to be over budget the rest of the year? To do this analysis I do have some manual work to get through first. The Company is currently running on different systems for accounting and budgeting so before I start my analysis I first need to cross check that the financial results and budgets in both systems tie to each other.

Finally, the most interesting project I’ll be working on is the updating of the budget for 2015. Once we get April results in, we’ll spend most of May – June analyzing the budget and updating it with what we think will happen May through December. I do think this project will also require a lot of manual work, but in order to update the budget we will have to meet with the managers and teams of each business line. This will give me an opportunity to learn more about how the advertising industry works, how to forecast and budget within this industry, and how to do it all in a great level of detail.

So the days have been flying by. The job is a lot more manual work than I had expected, but it keeps me busy and I’m learning a lot. My routine has changed a lot. I get up pretty early to work out before I leave for the office. I’m currently going through Barre (a fusion between pilates and ballet) three times a week and the rest of the days I do cardio. After working out I take the subway to work. Although it is a 50min commute, as I had mentioned in my previous blog, I get to read on it so it doesn’t feel like a waste of time. I get to work around 9:00-9:30 and leave sometime between 5:00-5:30. The work day flies by because I don’t have much downtime. Once I leave to go home, then spontaneity begins. Justin usually does most of the cooking at home and now that I’m working, there are even less nights when it’s my turn to cook. Sometimes when we’re lazy we go out to eat. The rest of the evening we spend watching TV or movies, hanging out with friends, going on walks/exploring (especially now the weather is getting nicer), listening to music, reading and just doing random things.

For now, my days are split into two parts. The first half is quite structured, the second is an adventure!