Week 5:
Teacher Created Materials

September 10, 2013

This week was month end, which involved a great deal of account reconciliation, posting journal entries, reclassing transactions, and building reports. For the entire week, I worked alongside my mentor and Senior Accountant, Jared Silva. During month close, it is the job of the Senior Accountant at any business to gather and consolidate the reports of all other accountants. For example, accounts receivable is completely finished on the last day of the month, because any incoming funds on the next day will simply be recorded for the following month. Accounts payable, on the other hand, is usually done four to five business days after the last day of the month, because all of the last second checks are being paid, and these payments are booked for that current month. Therefore, much of the week is spent in preparation for the receipt of these reports.

My first job for this week was to reconcile accounts from the previous month of July. This involved comparing the General Ledger Detail Reports, which show all of the transactions coming in and out of a certain account over a given period of time. This is done to ensure that all of the transactions in the accounting software match up with the Excel data that they keep for backup. There are many different kinds of accounting software, and TCM uses SAGE MAS. In my opinion, the SAGE software is very inefficient in some aspects. For example, there is no way to directly transfer data from Excel to the software, which would make posting data and reconciling accounts much easier. Regardless, it costs a great deal of time and money to switch software, which TCM cannot afford to do as they are completely changing their accounting practices as they grow to one with much more detail and description.

Once the accounts were reconciled, I was given many journal entries to enter into MAS. These entries reflected all of the incoming funds, outgoing funds, and transfers from account to account throughout the previous month. Once I entered an entry, I had to print in out, attach any significant documents, and file it away. There is also an Excel sheet, which keeps track of all of the journal entries, so I had to update that sheet as well. Each entry that I made was added to the general ledger detail, which will be used to reconcile the accounts in the following month close. Once all of the entries were put into the system, we had to reclass any necessary transactions. Reclassing transactions is simply the process of transferring funds from one account to another when either an entry was input incorrectly, or the accounting standards change.

As of today, we are still not finished with month-end close. We should have all the final reports completed by sometime tomorrow, which means that all of the members of the finance department will be meeting to discuss the income statement and bank reconciliation from August. I learned a great deal of what it is like to be a Senior Accountant this week. I was able to complete a great deal of tasks independently, and I would like to think that I made month-end close a little easier on everyone by being able to do various tasks. I look forward to seeing the finished product in the next few days, and being able to start new projects for the beginning of this month.