Day 8 (27 Oct 2022)

Today, there are two main things I have explored. One is to join my senior’s kick off meeting with client, another is I try to practice data cleaning task under Thao's guidance.

The kick off meeting started on afternoon time 3pm, kick off meeting is the first step we will do after we get the planning document from the engagement team colleagues, the meeting’s main objective is to walkthrough and explain to client regarding the document we need to request from them in order to carry out our ITGC task, it is especially important if we are handling the ‘first time’ company as the client might have no idea on what documents we really want, so through this kind of meeting, we can clearify client’s doubt and this will subsequently save the time and effort as to prevent client sending us the wrong document which require them to send one more time. At the same time, in the meeting, we can directly know which document client can provide us, which document client is not able to provide to us even which document is client unwilling to provide to us. The meeting I join today is belong to my colleague, Ili and the client is a public listed company in Cambodian namely Mircofinance. The meeting started on time, Ili started by greeting the clients and to explain the purpose of today meeting and ITGC test which is to test the effectiveness of company’s control. After that, Ili started to share screen to display the document request list and go through all one by one to ask whether client able to provide us the respective document or not. Ili also told me that because it is a first time client so we need to explain very detail to client and all the content should go through once, but if the company is not a first time company, the meeting can be done very fast as there is no need to go through all the areas considering the things are same like previous year.

I jotted down what Ili asked for each area and below are the conversation that I have recorded. After go through all the contents on the document request list, Ili thanks the client and mentioned will send them the updated request list to them soon. The meeting is then ended with the client express their appreciation.

The second thing I did today is to practice data cleaning for general ledger, Thao send me a file which has been done by colleague previous year, Thao want to do the data cleaning on the orginal general ledger as practice. Data clearning is to adjust the general ledgers in a format that are readable by the IDEA, if not we will be unable to proceed to the next step. Thao told me there is no fix way to do data clearing as different company might have different pattern on how it show the information, we need to be excel in using formula for the data clearning. The most common thing we need to take note during data clearning is the total debit should equal to total credit due to the double entry principle, if there is variance it could means the way we cleaned are wrong or it is client’ own problem. Second, we need to add a new field to put the company code, this is important if the company have its subsidiaries, then we need to identify which transaction is belong to which subsidiaries, so we can proceed to the append step. Doing the practice also allow to learn some new and useful excel shortcut. For example, clicking ‘ctrl’,’shift’ and ‘up’ together will bring us to the top cell, then click the ‘go to special’ button then select the ‘blank’, it will help us to select all the blank cells. There are a lot of shortcut I can learn and I am looking forward to explore it in future time.

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Main things that have learnt

• Join a kick off meeting (Mircofinance)

• Data cleaning practice for general ledger

• Learn some basic excel shortcut for data cleaning purpose

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Comment/idea/opinion

After joining the kick off meeting, I sense that communication skill is a very important skill no matter what job you are in, able to present clearly, politely will allow you to build up a good environment with client, then the task can be done more effectively. Another thing that I think it is important to learn in order to ensure we can do our task effectively is the excel skill, like today I know that excel shortcut is extremely important in the data cleaning job. I believe in the future I will be explored to a lot of excel short cut and I am glad to have this oppourtunity, a chance to learn something.