My First Financial Statements

The main purpose of auditing companies is to express an opinion on their financial statements as to whether they are free of material misstatement and are in conformity with generally accepted accounting principles in the United States of America.

You got that?

I recently had an opportunity to draft my first financial statements. Now normally, as a rookie accountant, you wouldn't get to do this for 2-3 years -- maybe more. But because our firm is short staffed and handling a lot of clients, I got the chance to gain some awesome experience.

The cool part is that we audit post-secondary institutions: trade schools, medical/health training schools, etc,. and these auditor's reports end up in the hands of the U.S. Department of Education. So they're kind of important. If the school doesn't get a favorable opinion from us, they could potentially lose their funding from the Fed and that would pretty much be the end of them. As far as I know though, our firm rarely if ever has to issue anything but an unqualified opinion.

We have a template that we use and we just plug in the final numbers. The footnotes to the financials need to be modified for each client, but we just roll that forward from the previous years financials and make any applicable changes. It's not too difficult, but like I said, in general, staff auditors would never ever get to do this at larger firms. Kinda nice. More pressure, but worth it in the end.

Anyways, my draft made it through two Partner reviews and is about to be issued next week.

After I've done this a few more times, I'm sure I'll be over it and wish I could go back to no responsibility.