Audit Assistant Review

I really enjoyed working within the main KPMG offices and the relatively small teams meant that it was easy to get to know everyone initially. I found travelling to different client's offices to be difficult as I don't drive, but other members of the team offered lifts when possible. The main downside was that there is a lot of tedious cross-referencing to be done within audit and there's only so much you can learn from checking one excel sheet against another manually.

Everyone I met within KPMG were helpful and friendly. People always offered the interns drinks when they were making tea/coffee and would always try to give us work to do.

Each intern is assigned a mentor for the duration of their internship, and this person is then your go-to person for general questions. This works really well and fortunately my mentor was really useful and went out of her way to make sure I always knew what jobs I was on, how I was going to get there and who else I would be working with.

It varied quite a lot. In the early stages of an audit there is plenty of cross referencing and basic work to be done, so the interns are pretty busy. Though near the closing stages of the audit the work shifts to more high-level reviewing, so you can find yourself feeling surplus.

This varied a lot between different clients. On large clients you'll find yourself with less responsibility and you're generally just sitting in the audit room doing analysis on excel. Smaller clients were much better though as you get a considerable amount of client interaction. I frequently spoke to Financial Controllers and Accounts Managers from small clients.

Coming from a non-accounting background, I found there to be an initial learning curve as I found my way around balance sheets and interim reports. Permanent staff were always helpful though and were happy to answer any questions. The experience of working with clients will be particularly useful for my future career, but there is only so much you can learn from the actual audit work you're tasked with. Cross-referencing journals and comparing prior year numbers is a large part of audit, but as an intern you won't pick up many transferrable skills from doing it.

Everyone appeared to be in good spirits and were always keen to make general chat about how my weekend was/how I was finding the internship. There was also a good working relationship between the managers, audit assistants the partners. Managers were always happy to answer questions, even if they were busy, and partners often took the time to ask about my background and future ambitions, which was a nice touch considering how busy they were!

I had a timetable on day 2 of what clients I would be at and staff were happy to give me a briefing about what to expect at each company based on their past experiences. Unfortunately a couple of the jobs I was booked onto didn't materialise in the end so I spent 2 extra weeks in the KPMG offices but this wasn't necessarily a bad thing and I got involved with other projects. The first 2 days consist of an induction event, where you spend a day speaking to pretend clients and reading through documents, then on the second day you prepare a presentation and present your recommendations to an actual KPMG partner. The winners won £20 of Amazon gift vouchers.

Staff dedicated a lot of time to make sure I knew what I was doing and were happy to answer any questions I had. They also did try to find a range of interesting tasks for me to get involved in, and failing that let me shadow them when they were speaking to clients. I also got to attend a few high-profile meetings and these were some of the most interesting moments of the internship. There was a lack of formal training though, apart from a 2 day induction which didn't resemble any of the work we faced on a daily basis.

I was offered a job but I decided to decline as I didn't feel like a job in accounting was for me. This wasn't reflective of KPMG in particular, though I did hear a few horror stories of long days during the busy January period. Overall I would say that my opinion of KPMG has increased during the time I spent there, I just realised I didn't want to stay within the accounting area for my long-term career.

Since there was only 1 intern assigned per job it was hard to build up much of a friendship with any of the other interns as we all spent so much time out of the office with clients. We did go for an intern meal on the penultimate day of our internship and this was a great opportunity to speak to the other interns and chat about how we were all finding the internship.

Birmingham isn't particularly expensive and KPMG provide a £4 lunch allowance when out at clients. Lunch is provided at the staff canteen when working in the office. The £4 lunch allowance is plenty and it was easy to claim this back through the expenses system. You just need to keep hold of your receipts. The staff canteen was slightly expensive and I often found I had to add extra money onto my ID card to ensure I could afford a decent lunch each day.

There's not a great social scene of an evening in Birmingham. There are a few bars in Brindleyplace but these aren't often busy of an evening. We did arrange an intern meal in the last week and we went to a nice restaurant in the Mailbox, which is a relatively new area of Birmingham which has numerous restaurants and shops. There is plenty to do on the weekends in Birmingham though and Broad Street is always busy on a Friday and Saturday evening. If you venture out of the city centre there are a range of pubs and bars in a suburb called Moseley and most big name music artists visit the city to play at the LG Arena or the O2 Academy.

There was also an induction event on the first night where KPMG took us for a meal, for drinks, bowling and put us up in the Hilton hotel. There was a monthly pub quiz but the interns missed out on the big office day out to Alton Towers which was planned for the week after we left. With everyone constantly being out of the office at different client sites, some of which are over an hour away, it was quite difficult to organise large events as people were already doing a lot of travelling.