CFA Level 1 - 46% pass rate

CFA Level 1 Results

Congratulations to everyone who passed the CFA Level 1 results which came out today.

The pass rate was 46% which was extremely high. This has got to be one of the best passing rates I’ve ever seen as usually the passing rate is around 33%.

I woke up to a very nice passing grade. I had a good feeling I passed and this put a lot of waiting to the side.

Almost 1 in every 2 people passed this year which is insane.

The experience, looking back, was well worth it. It was like studying for a mini UFE. =)

New Blogger - A.Ahad

Hi Everyone!

My name is A.Ahad and this is actually my first blog ever so I'll just talk a little bit about myself. I am still working towards my CA designation and this year I'll actually be going into second year of the Math/CA program at the University of Waterloo. I have lived in five different countries and have gone to ten different schools in the past twelve years. Over this time, I have met thousands of people with various personalities and have learned a lot of things about a lot of things (but there's still more to learn).

All in all, I'd say that I have a relatively optimistic view on the CA Designation and life in general, but don't expect me to tell you that everything is all dandy when it's not- I still deal in facts! The reason why I love this blog so much is because of its down-right-straight-forwardness. You gotta love that! I hope to continue with the down-right-straight-forwardness and provide some down-right-entertainment along with it!

If you have any questions, you can contact me at ahad.iqbal@gmail.com

Internal Audit--Through an Intern's Eyes

Hi all, I am Big Tuna (shout out to all Office fans) and will be posting periodically my experiences as an intern.

I am currently a Sophomore going on Junior in Fall as an Accounting major. I work in internal audit of a large corporation in the Southwestern United States. That's all I will reveal of my identity for obvious reasons.

I hope to enlighten you with some insider knowledge of what it is like to work in the audit department for a non-accounting company.

But what is Internal Audit? In any large company, there must be measures and safeguards in place to ensure maximum efficiency and compliance with regulations. Internal auditors are the people that check on just about every aspect of the company to ensure accuracy and efficiency. For example, internal audit would audit everything from payroll to fleet maintenance. And then an external audit group (like PWC or another Big 4) comes in and audits whatever it is that they audit (I'm not too familiar about this end of it).

So you ask yourself, why go into internal audit? Well I've been asking myself the same question. I've been here almost three months and still have yet to see any meaningfulness in this work. From what I gather through conversations with the auditors, it appears that most do not really enjoy work. I can kind of see why. Imagine this: You are assigned to audit the Fuels Purchasing department (assume you work in a factory that buys a lot of fuel for its operations). Oh wow, this should be fun, you think to yourself. Wrong. You ask the supervisor in Fuels for a stack of purchase orders. After much hemming and hawing they finally allow you to borrow their original copies just long enough for you to make copies. You rush back and make the copies (meaning you make the intern do it). Then the testing begins. For those of you who are unfamiliar with auditing, to "test" means you pretty much find some samples of whatever it is you're auditing. In each sample you have a master sheet with supporting documents/sources. Then you find a few numbers on the master sheet, and you flip through till you find those numbers in your source docs, you tick and tie them, then you do it again for your entire stack of samples. Great fun. It gets really old really quickly when you realize that you're pretty much making little marks with red pencil for hours on end by checking documents that are accurate for the most part. Granted, without this deterrent could be rampant fraud and waste, etc, but that's beside the point.

The thing you have to keep in mind with internal audit is that you are working with the same documents, same departments, and same procedures year after year with the rare addition or removal of a department. So if you are the type of person who likes to audit a lot of different companies and different industries, etc, you might not want to do internal audit since you don't really get to work with anything outside of your company. At the same time, it has been said that working in internal audit gives you a really good insight and perspective on how a company is run, because you get to see all the different parts of a company that all somehow connect together to form a well oiled corporation machine. This allgedly is good for those looking to eventually run their own companies or hold an executive position of some sort. But even this is over-hyped. More on this in a later post. Oh, and the other thing about internal audit is you don't get to travel nearly as much as external auditors, because everything you're auditing is in the same building. The hours are also a lot more manageable. Nobody here goes over 40 hours a week (at least so far from May - July)

I guess from what I've seen so far, my recommendation for those looking to pursue a career in auditing is this: If you don't have much of an imagination, enjoy working by yourself a lot, don't mind monotonous work, have attention to detail, enjoys following instructions, don't mind doing work that seems pointless (in your mind), and wants a steady paycheck, then I'd say auditing is for you.

However, if you have a free and entreprenural spirit, enjoy interacting with others, want workdays that offer something new and different each day, then I would say stay the hell away from internal (and possibly external) audit.

In my next post I will reveal some personal insight of my co-workers, some of the duties I do as an intern here, and more on life as an auditor.

It's Summer Time.....

And what does that mean? Well, sun, fun, and summer school, at least for me :(

As accountants, we understand the value of our time and we hate procrastination, right? We like to stay organized and get our work out of the way so we can maybe have some free time, right? Well a good friend of mine learned the hard way….

Let me tell you a story about a girl named Julie:

Once upon a time Julie started attending the CA recruiting events at our school. She dressed up in her best formal attire, did her hair in such a way that she looked as elegant as ever, and she wore glasses in an attempt to look more professional.

At the events, Julie introduced herself to as many people as she could, gave business cards to every one of them, and asked meaningful and well thought questions. At the end of the event Julie said her goodbyes and went back home feeling more than satisfied with her performance.

That same night ended up being the application deadline for two firms that Julie was interested in. At the last minute Julie was panicking trying to make changes to her cover letters and resumes to reflect the firm that she was applying to. With less than five minutes left Julie submitted her applications and felt a sigh of relief.

Julie is an intelligent person but is also very unorganized and a strong believer in procrastination. The next day, just to make sure that her applications were submitted properly, she decided to logon to the recruiting site and take a look at her applications.

Julie entered her username and password, clicked on submitted applications, and then on the PwC link. She waited five seconds and up popped her resume and cover letter………except it didn’t say PwC on it, it said KPMG!!! “Oh no!” exclaimed Julie! Oh no indeed…

As it turns out, Julie sent PwC her KPMG resume and cover letter and KPMG her PwC resume and cover letter!!

It’s Summer Time….

Yes, it is….but school starts in about six weeks. Start working on those cover letters, resumes and get your business cards ready. After all, you don’t want to miss the deadlines, submit cover letters and resumes with errors, or end up sending the wrong firm the wrong application because you were in panic mode!

Attending all the recruiting sessions, working on your applications, and doing school work all at the same time can be overwhelming. So get a head start, and as my buddy Zac Efron says, ‘get your head in the game!’

P.S. That will be the one and only reference to Zac Efron I’ll ever make...I hope :)

The Advisor

Hey everyone,

I’m The Advisor, IwantobeaCA’s newest blogger!

I’m a recent grad from a great university (at least I think so :P) and will be starting with a big 4 firm in the next couple of months. I hope to add value to this website by blogging about my past, present and future experiences. Following this will be my first blog post. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it :)

I am more than happy to answer any questions you may have. You can contact me via email at theaccadvisor@gmail.com

Interested in blogging about your experiences?

I am currently looking for people interested in helping me out with my blog as writers, or graphic designers looking to help improve the layout of the website.

Right now I am a one man team who has lots of things I want to do. This blog started out just as me wanting to fume a bit, but I’ve received so much positive feedback, I feel it is my duty to make this blog the best as it can be. I feel almost bad that I can only come up with an average of one blog post a week. But Big 4 life doesn’t really give you much time. =(

Some background:

IwanttobeaCA blog has jumped up in the google search rankings when you type in “CA designation”. We have had over 10,000 page views since the blog opened, and over 100 unique readers a week. This is just a rough estimate. For a blog that started out just 2 months ago, I think it is doing very well, with lots of loyal readers.

The goal of this blog is to provide no-BS quality rich content about the CA designation, your experiences in accounting, school, Big 4 mystique, and anything else regular accountants want to plain know about.

If you are interested, contact me at iwanttobeaca@gmail.com, or press contact me at the top of the blog. Depending on quality of work, small compensation will be provided. Although, please do not contact me if this is your only goal. I am looking for dedicated people who are interested in helping improve and expand our blog. Whether you only one to do one guest post, or if you want to be a part of my team, contact me!

Thank You to all our readers and supporters. I will continue working hard to provide quality rich content.

Summer is Sweet at Big 4

Summer is sweet.

Especially so at Big four. After finishing a boring pension audit, I find myself unassigned for this week with nothing to do. Summer and Busy Season at Big Four is like night and day. Unless you get yourself assigned on a terrible audit with a July year end, life in July is good.

Busy Season has long been over and people are happy with their forty hour work weeks. I’d give it another month or so before the gloom and doom starts again. Summer is almost bearable at Big Four. The work still sucks, but at least the hours are reasonable.

A very wise senior once told me why people have mental break downs in big 4.

You can have a stressful job as long as the hours are good.
You can have a job with long hours as long as the work isn’t stressful.
But when you combine long hours and stress, you have a mental breakdown.

I’m happy to say I’m not seeing a lot of mental breakdowns in the summer time.

With every summer comes…

FOSI (Fresh off School Interns)

Interns have it good in the summer. They barely get to do any work. Some of the interns I have been talking to have been complaining about the lack of work their getting on their 3 month internship. Oh, to be an ambitious college kid again…

One intern wanted a performance review after spending 2 hours photocopying documents, and preparing binders. =) Another walked around the office introducing himself to every manager trying to get work. =)

Silly interns.

Getting into Big 4 is like getting into your first bad relationship as a kid.

Here is why:

1)You’re excited and have a new wave of confidence.
2) Your jealous friends think you’re so cool.
3) You’re eager to please.
4) You tell everyone. “I work at Big 4” “I’m dating Sam”
5) You get money.
6) Point 5 refers to you being a prostitute not a relationship. Oops. My mistake.
7) You spend way too much time.
8) You’ll be asked to order/make food.
9) Sometimes you wonder if you’re being taken advantage of.
10) Your parents wonder why you come home so late.
11) Your parents don’t know what you’re doing.
12) You tell yourself things will get better.
13) You’re made to do things you don’t want to.
14) You wonder if this is the ONE where you will spend the rest of your life.
15) You consider leaving but what will your friends/parents think?
16) You’re asked to eat things you don’t want to… um… like hours of course.
17) There are good times and bad times.
18) Bad times seem to be a lot worse.
19) The longer you stay, the worse it gets.
20) The smart ones leave early.

Do you steal from your firm's office supplies?

Do you steal from your firm’s office supplies?

Be Honest. =)

Today I’d like to just take a look at the irony about the CA designation, a professional degree with the "highest ethical standards." A professor of mine, once upon a time when I was in school, mentioned that the big four firms suffered from Office supply raiding once co-ops were close to finishing their work term.

It’s pretty funny cause I’m pretty sure this hasn’t changed. In fact, working at a big 4 firm, I can say this still pretty much happens. It’s virtually impossible to tell if someone is taking office supplies for personal use or actual firm use.

Here are the smartest and most clever ways to steal from your Big 4 firm. Who says accountants aren’t smart?

1) Shipping personal items in firm envelopes. You can run an ebay business.

2) Stealing Dell laptop chargers. This one is borderline wrong. But how many people only lock their laptops and leave their laptop chargers and mouse lying around.

3) Look at the bottom of your dell laptop. There is a Windows XP professional cd key. Working XP cdkey + market for it = $$

4) Excessive Photocopying/Printing for personal use. I know some people who prints ebooks at work and reads them on the train.

5) 11 Hour = Dinner allowance means charge 11 hours on a day when you’re hungry and less hours the next day when you’re not.

6) You take the highway to work. You charge your client the “city route” for your mileage.

7) Stealing Binders, folders, sheet protectors

8) Stealing Pencils, Pens, paper clips, highlighters, tape, etc i.e. the newbies .

Which one are you guilty of? =P

What are the other most creative ways to steal from your firm?

Note: I want to be a CA accounting blog does not engage in, support or endorse any of these activities. Stealing is wrong and can result in you losing your job. This is a satirical post, and should be only taken as so.