What does an audit trainee actually do? (ACA training contract)

Just curious, I have absolutely 0 experience so far. What is the actual work physically being done as an audit trainee? I will begin an ACA training contract soon in a global top 8 firm (completed CFAB so far) and I'm 99% sure I will be placed in audit but have no idea what to expect.

(edited 3 years ago)

Loads of youtube videos on this, people have quite diverse experiences so its good to hear from a range of people at firms of different sizes

Reply 3

Obuni

Original post by Fox Hound

@Obuni

Cheers for the heads up!

Reply 4

Obuni

Original post by sarim.x

The work as an audit trainee is essentially testing account balances. As you're CFAB, i'm sure you're aware of the income statement/P&L and the balance sheet. We essentially take both of these financial statements and perform different "tests" to ensure that the values are not misstated i.e they are correctly valued.

E.g if say that client has £2m in receivables on the balance sheet, we would request a detailed excel breakdown which shows all of the transactions which totalled £2m. We would then take a sample and then agree to invoice. Let's say we take a sample of 3 transactions with the following amounts: £1000, £10,000, £15,000. We should essentially be able to trace this to an invoice (an invoice is just a document that a company would send to a customer to confirm with the customer that they owe x amount).

Another method of testing we may do is to agree these sample values to bank statements. For example, if at your year end (31st December 2020) you say you had £1000 in receivables according to sample 1, we would expect you would receive this amount within the first quarter of 2021 (which is the point we would be auditing the company).

You essentially perform a range tests such as above with all of the different account balances