There are different seasons during the audit working year. This is demonstrated by the audit doughnut:

I am going to give an insight into what the trainee auditor’s life tastes like.

The Main Doughnut Sections

Busy Season
Half of the year’s audit work will be concentrated into these three months. Annoyingly, it is also the darkest and wettest time of the year.

College and Exams
Exams are a horrid burden and will ruin a lot of weekends for three years. However, college is a nice break from work. It’s a good chance to catch up with the other trainees who you otherwise wouldn’t see.

Holiday
25 days is the standard number of holiday time. You don’t have to take it during the summer and Christmas, but you can’t take any during busy season and college time is immovable.

The most interesting doughnut finding is that trainees don’t actually work that much when you add college and holiday time. For that reason trainee auditors don’t get paid as much as bankers or lawyers, but the trade-off is fair.

The September Milestone

Accountancy firms are the largest recruiters of graduates, therefore, the audit year follows the academic year because most join in September. The new first years do bring a feeling of renewal. The new joiners’ event celebrates their entry by subjecting them to the ritual humiliation of karaoke. They made me remember when I joined just 12 months previously. I realised how far I had come in that time (and how much stationery I had wasted).

September is also promotion and pay rise season. This is celebrated by the awarding of medals and the consumption of doughnuts.

Social Events

Large social committee budgets and mandatory contributions means that there are lots of social events throughout the year.

Alcohol
The highlight is the Christmas party, which is ridiculously messy but will give you lots to talk about until next year. There are regular pub meetings, which are mainly caused by a high turnover of staff leading to lots of leaving drinks.

Strangely, there are no regular pre-weekend Friday drinks because auditors are scattered throughout different client sites and are not based in a common location. The other (implausible) explanation is that I’m not being invited.

Corporate Social Responsibility Day
This is where the department take a day out of work to help the community. In my first year, we painted an old persons home. Other departments have gardened, cleared rubbish and done volunteer auditing for the needy.

Department Away Day
The department stops auditing and does something fun for a day. This may include sailing, horse racing and hunting bandits

Inter-Department Sports Events
The rivalries cover football, pub quizzes and netball. Accountants are competitive. The sight of partners dressed in fairy wings and pink leggings is pretty scary.

Looking Forward

Trainee auditors enjoy a varied (and tasty) life. If you are are having a bad week then there is always an event or a change in activity to look forward to. Fifteen exams is daunting when you start but time does pass crazily quickly. Busy season is hard but there are lots of fun times too. I look forward to qualification and the lifting of the exam burden. But the audit doughnut does become somewhat less interesting:

Benefits in Lent ended with a total budget deficit of £18.62. A respectable performance. However, as alluded to in previous weeks, Benefits in Lent was not a perfect simulation and another trick was to defer purchases until after Lent. But this gives a false picture of what I actually spent during Lent.

For this reason, audits take place after the end of the financial year. Transactions and events after the year end give information about conditions during the year. These are called post balance sheet events.

What I did afterwards

I needed a haircut two weeks ago. However, I avoided the immediate cost by waiting until after Lent and using a comb more often. I’ve just done a large online Tesco shop and replenished vital supplies of washing powder, cleaning products, peanut butter and pheasant. Adjusting for post balance sheet events, I should have a deficit of around £103.20+ (unaudited figure).

This week I most looked forward indulging my Starbucks coffee habit at will. I drunk many caffè lattes and re-identified myself with accounting trainee-literati. But I never used to buy coffee so regularly before Lent, so why should I change now?

I believe in corporate coffee. Photo by rudolf_schuba.

Final Thoughts

If I’m honest, the last six weeks have not been that challenging. The problem with Benefits in Lent was that it was always temporary. The fact that it was only 6 weeks made it easier because I could pre-buy and then defer purchases. If it was permanent, I would find it impossible.

I’ve learnt the importance of using what resources we have wisely, whether it is money, time or bandit-avoidance skills. Most of all I will remember Benefits in Lent for the awesome spreadsheets.

I saved £10.84 in week 5. It makes up for some of the previous weeks budgetary excesses and brings the Lent Debt down to a manageable £5.71. That’s 8.9% of my benefits income and favourably compares to the UK national debt, which is 53.5% of GDP. Therefore, I believe that should be considered for this man’s job:

Credit

Most Britons have access to cheap credit. It’s useful for unexpected emergencies, such as car repairs or a broken economy. I used “notional credit” to cover my spending overruns but this was unrealistic because I wasn’t charged any interest.

In real life, the poor only have access to the most expensive forms of credit. For example, I found a website that offered a one-day £50 loan for a finance charge of £14.75 – giving an APR of 2222.46%. Crazy – but what alternative is there when things break and food runs out?

Savings

Low income means that there is no slack. Building wealth and safety buffers is not possible. In Britain, the top 10% of the population owns 53% of the wealth and the bottom 50% own 7%. The point is, nobody ever escaped poverty without saving.

Budgeting

The natural argument is that those on benefits should not live beyond their means. No-one disputes this, but that doesn’t explain why budgeting is often absent. I venture two reasons:

1) Poor financial education – Financial education in schools is currently not compulsory and its delivery is varying (source: FSA study). Financial habits are learnt at the home. However, what message do you learn when you see everything going on a credit card, or a quick loan company being used. Unfortunately, there’s evidence that the under-40s are less financially capable than their elders (source: FSA study). The bankers have highlighted the dangers of a lack of financial nous.

2) Societal expectations – Eating out used to be a rare treat. Now I’ve memorised the Pizza Express menu and eating out is one of my bigger expenses. Mobile phone are everywhere. Computers are considered essential. Everyone has a high definition TV (except me). It’s easy to say that the poor should do without these things. But we can’t live our expensive lifestyles and wonder why others don’t want the same.

Now we have a difference between income and expectations. Debt is the only way to fill the gap. Most of society is in debt – I’m in a negative wealth position if you count my student loan. However, the poor suffer more intensely from debt because of much higher interest rates.

Financial Services

Financial services, such as credit, have made our lives better by making it possible to withstand unexpected events. This is why I welcome the government’s decision to make bank accounts universal for all.

However, the poor are still disadvantaged. They live on the edge of a cliff with loan sharks waiting if they fail.