Week 6:
Teacher Created Materials

September 17, 2013

As my time at Teacher Created Materials is drawing to a close, all of the concepts and ideas that I have learned are beginning to tie together. This week, I was finally able to view and analyze the consolidated company financials, which are a complete reflection of all of the numbers that I have been working with through all of the individualized reports and projects that I have been assigned. Along with this, I was able to experience a company-wide meeting which involved revealing a few of the newly developed products that will be introduced to customers during the new school year. This meeting also went into the company culture at a more in depth level, and I was able to observe more what TCM hopes to become in both the short term and the long term.

TCM’s mission statement is: “Teacher Created Materials develops innovative and imaginative educational materials and services for students worldwide. Everything we do is created by teachers for teachers and students to make teaching more effective and learning more fun.” This mission statement was formed within the last few years, and effectively embodies TCM as a brand and a company. It was good to have this meeting, because I, from the aspect of finance and accounting, had not really experienced the driving factors behind the business and the goals. This meeting was an eye opener, and really encouraged employees to work harder for something extremely important.

While the meeting was influential from an aspect of understanding the business, being able to review the company financials was significant in furthering my understanding of accounting and financial reporting. In order to run the financials, Jared and I needed to complete any remaining journal entries that needed to be booked for the month of August, and we needed to reconcile any accounts that these entries would be effecting. One account that we had trouble with is the Operating Account. This account essentially draws all of the information from accounts payable and accounts receivable throughout the month. The result is an extremely large report with many Excel pages that need to be reviewed and corrected if there are any numerical issues. Since this account can be reconciled as soon as AP and AR are closed, we had been working on the finalized numbers for five working days with no success in getting the balance to tie. On about the tenth time of going through the report, I found a few numbers that were out of place on the AR side. There were two credits that we were to issue to customers that were posted in to our accounting software, but these credits had not yet been reflected in the bank account numbers provided by Comerica. Jared and I went over this scenario, and he placed a strong importance on being able to tell a story regarding the numbers, because simply showing that the misplaced numbers exist is not enough if an auditor were to question their validity. After we worked this issue out, we were able to run the preliminary financials. This report would not be finalized until all of the members of the financial team reviewed and approved of its contents. The CFO was able to notice a few issues with commission statements, so we fixed these problems and ran the finalized financial report. Due to confidentially reasons, I am not able to give any of the finalized numbers, percentages, or figures.

This week I was finally able to connect with one of my best friends from home who had moved out to Los Angeles just over a year ago. His brother is a professional comedian who tours nationwide, and he performed at the Irvine Improv last Thursday, which is only about twenty minutes from my residence in Huntington Beach. It was great seeing them for the first time in a few years, and we were even able to stay after the performance and talk with all of the comedians. As a huge fan of stand-up comedy, it was very cool to have normal conversations with a lot of the people that I listen to who are not as highly recognizable to the normal public. Week 6 was a great week for me at TCM. With only one more full week, I hope I get to continue learning about the financials of the small business in new ways.