Accounting Internship in Kuwait Wind General Trading and Contracting Company - Essay Example

Accounting internship report Introduction Internship allows the to try the skills they have learnt in andput them to practice to pursue that career occupation. It is the component of the education program that at UAK that is able to provide an opportunity to enable students’ intellectual development through applying their knowledge. As a result, it is difficult for an internship to be purely observational. My career objectives entail being the best in what I do. I intended to work in collaboration with other individuals in the organization to ensure that I put to practice all the skills that I learned in class. To be the best accountant, one has to be acquainted with all every accounting detail in the organization in question because a single mistake could be detrimental for the whole organization in general. That is why I aimed at practicing all the accounting theory I had been taught in school to ensure that I put it to practice. The company would be appropriate in meeting my career objectives since it has a very elaborate finance department, which is very important for the well-being of the entire organization in general. The finance department works in collaborations with other departments to ensure that financial details of the organization are in order. Considering the large number of departments present in the organization, I felt that this organization would equip me with the exposure I needed to achieve my career goals. Description of the company Kuwait Wind General Trading and Contracting Company are seen as an innovative and young company located in Kuwait. It is aimed at developing various business concepts in Kuwait. The company deals with various sectors in Kuwait and UAE. Some of the sectors involved include electronic games, various coffee shops, distribution of cosmetics, restaurants, and real estate. The company prioritizes its business concepts by ensuring that it develops new ideas that compete with their imagination and creativity. Their main principles entail provision of various solid services, which are customer oriented and produces rapid results. They aim at ensuring that their services are available to all their targeted customers at the highest quality possible to be in a position to meet the requirements of their customers. The company is represented in several departments: Kuwait head office that is mainly the administration office where all the coordination of the projects, human resource, and finance are handled. Café les Amis which is a brand coffee shop that Kuwait Wind Company began about five years ago. It is a local shop that deals with coffee but has a French concept. So far, the coffee shop has three branches one at the airport, the second one in the discovery mall and the last one in the lobby of Mazaya tower in the new Kuwait business center in Kuwait city. MS Villa is the department that deals with real estate, which is managed by the company. There are varieties of villas that are building and rented to various expatriates in the region and abroad. All the villas are located in Saddiq and there is a complete department that guarantees good maintenance of the rented villa and follow up to the ones still under construction. The company also has an electronic games shop that is located at the discovery mall. It is under the management of one manager and it has two sales representatives. Synergy distribution, which is the latest department of the company. It is only one year old and the completed one year was spent obtaining licenses from the ministry of health for the department to be in a position to distribute all the products in Kuwait. The internship began on 14th October 2014 and the company required my presence for only two and a half hours on a daily basis. The head office, where I was situated closed on Fridays and Saturdays. Thus, my attendance was quite flexible as long as it fell between 9 AM and 5 PM. On my first visit, I was supposed to be introduced to all the members of the administrative staff. As evident, the finance department was required to work in collaboration with all the other departments since they are responsible for payments. The following day, I attended a meeting where I was introduced to the company in general. The entire department was described in details and the participation that the finance department had was defined. In some departments, they rely so much on the finance department while others, managers were involved with large parts of the financial parts of the departments. On the third day, I sat at my desk in the finance department. I got familiar with the filing system of the department. In the coming weeks, I would deal with most departments of the department. The department that requires a lot of support right now is the synergy department since all the products, and the customer’s needs should be registered in the department’s financial program. That was how the organization had organized my internship plan. Description of my internship My duties mainly involved working in the finance department in collaboration with other departments in the organization. I was supposed to deal with different documents that the financial department was using. My daily activities entailed various duties including: Checking the credit cards used by the customers when making payments. This entailed looking at the name of the credit card’s company, date, time, and that the amount in the receipt was the same as the one in the sales invoice. I was required to check and ensure that the amount was approved or declined and compare the usage of the credit cards with the daily reconciliation of the bank. Check the cash money deposited on the account of the company and make sure that it equaled the amount mentioned on the total sales in cash from the branch in question. Record the supplier’s credit invoices in the journal voucher. I was required to check all the invoices that were received by the suppliers, the total amount charged by the company. I had to ensure that the company’s stamp was on the received invoice, data, and the number of the invoice. Check the allowed discount for the staff on a daily basis and for certain customers. For instance, in the coffee shop, there was the staff beverage benefit for all the staff of the coffee shops. I needed to check how much was used on a daily basis. Review the daily sales voucher. This is the summary of the sales made per day. The store manager had to sign on it. Moreover, the POS’s report reflects the same number as the one that was present on the sales voucher and only then could I record all the information in the counting program. In the payments procedure, I had to compare the records of the supplier with the entries of the company. After wards, I had to prepare a supplier’s reconciliation and if all the figures were correct, I could prepare a payment voucher using the accounting program of the company. In week four when the accountant is preparing a chart of accounts, I was supposed to enter all details of the international suppliers to identify the products for each company. Check the discounts agreed upon with the purchaser. I was supposed to check the sales representatives of the specific store or department where I entered the codes in the system with exact quantity and prices. Initially, I began working not knowing what to expect in terms of my interactions with others. I started at a low moment of fear that I might not deliver as expected since I lacked the required work experience. However, from week five, I began feeling more confident with the allocated tasks. In fact, Mr. Mahmud, having seen this confidence proposed that I process all the tasks I had been introduced to for the pat weeks on my own. The agreement was that I had to take charge of some of the activities by myself and he would check at the end of the day whether I had handled them correctly. Initially, I felt as if the company overloaded me with work due to the numerous filling that is required. However, I learned that a good filling system is important in an organization to ensure that the important documents of the organization are not lost in the process. I developed numerous work relations with employees in all departments in the company who exercised much patience in me. They guided me in understanding what I found it hard to understand and they were always there to correct me whenever I made a mistake (Alba, Bathija and Thornton, 34). Moreover, I came out of that attachment with adequate work experience, which enabled me to understand how a finance department functions in real life. The internship provides me with various opportunities and limitations. The opportunities enabled me to gain important skills that enabled me to advance my career goals. For instance, under careful supervision, I was mandated to undertake various important tasks in the organization that included preparation of suppliers’ reconciliation to establish whether the figures were correct. Afterwards, I could prepare the payments voucher using the accounting program of Kuwait wind. It therefore, provided me with the opportunity to gain the required confidence and to better my experiences in the organization that would come in handy in my future employments. However, the best opportunity came along when Mr. Mahmud proposed that I conduct all the tasks that I had learned the past weeks on my own with no supervision. He proposed that he would review what I had done in the evening to find out whether I had conducted them as required. This was a breakthrough for me since it enabled me to exercise the skills I had learned on my own. It motivated me to work even harder since I felt that the organization had faith in me to bring out the best in me. I also had the opportunity to work in various departments of the organization that enabled me to have good working relations with all employees of the organization that was a plus for me in gaining the required expertise. Good relations with the employees ensured that they helped me in any way possible to reach the set goals and objectives of my internship and my career objectives. The limitations included initially working under supervision. I had to work under strict supervision for the first four weeks that made me feel unfulfilled. If I could not be allowed to conduct a task on my own for the first four week, I wondered how I could learn and make sure that I had gained the required expertise. Another limitation occurred with the hours that I was required to work on a daily basis. I felt like I needed more daily hours in the organization to gain more expertise. After all, there is no organization that will employ me in future to work for only two and a half hours per day. I felt like I needed to be in the organization for my internship at the necessary set time that other employees are required to report and leave when the other employees in the organization were leaving. This, though tiresome, could ensure that I gained more expertise and I got used to working in the same time period as the employees of the organization. My high points included when I was allowed to work on my own with minimal supervision. The only supervision could occur after I had completed the allocated task to show that I had conducted the work as required. Another high point for me occurred when I had to transverse various departments of the organization in the course of my internship. Relating with various employees in the organization really motivated me to work hard and be in their position some day. My low point occurred during my initial stage in the organization. I felt as if the filling system was too much for me to handle and I did not like it at all. However, after wards, I understood that the filling system is a crucial part of any organization since most of the documents filed are important for the organization. Failure to file them properly could result into misplacement or loss of such documents that could lead to problems in the involved department. Maintaining my journal had both benefits and drawbacks. One of the benefits is that it enabled me to keep a list of the experiences for the day that I experienced in the organization. In so doing, I could refer back to them in future in case I required a specific detail about my internship that I could have otherwise forgotten. Thus, it helped me keep track of my daily activities. Secondly, it made it easier for me to record my thought about my experience in the organization while they are still fresh. The disadvantages are that it is quite difficult for me to talk about my experiences in the organization without referring back to the journals. The company followed the internship plan that they had given me. The reason is that first of all they spent the better part of the first week introducing me to the employees of the organization and I was only allowed to sit in my desk in the accounting office in the last day of the first week that’s 16th October. The following weeks, I spent transversing other departments of the organizations conducting various tasks that were allocated to me. True to the plan of the organization, I spent a lot of time in the synergy department since it was new and it required a lot of support to ensure that all the products and customers were registered in the financial program. The other departments were much easier to handle since managers managed their financial information in some of them. Thus, my tasks in such departments were limited unless such managers required some help. Summary and conclusion The purpose of the internship was to try out the skills learned in class to enhance the student’s intellectual development through application of knowledge. The objectives of the internship were met. The reason is that most of the tasks that were allocated to me, I had learned them in class. What was required of me was to apply the knowledge taught to me in class to complete the allocated tasks. Invoice preparation and accounting aspects of my academic proved useful since I was able to apply them in various instances of preparing some of these accounting documents. One of the documents I prepared using my academic expertise includes the supplier’s reconciliation. Given an opportunity, I would work in the organization again because they provided me with an opportunity to learn and improve on the minor mistakes that I made here and there. If I had an opportunity to repeat the internship I would advocate for more hours per day to ensure that, I am in the organization in more hours per day. This would be useful in ensuring that I became comfortable with the task allocated early. I learned that I am a patient person and ready to learn. The reason is that despite that I did not like filling system initially, I continued with the internship without knowing what to expect later in the internship. I took any help rendered to me positively and was always ready to learn and try out new things in the organization. The advice I would give to other students is that patience always pays. They should work hard in their internships because at the end of the day, it would enable them to learn and develop new and required skills. Overall, the internship was worth doing since it enabled me to gain experience that I never had. I saw and learned how a finance department operates in real life. Work Cited Alba, Jason, Manisha Bathija and Matthew Thornton. Vault career guide to accounting. New York: Vault Inc., 2009. Read More