So, I'm catching up on a few challenges on "From Our Blog 2 Yours" at the Sweet Shoppe. This one is about our occupation and how we spend our days. I could go sweet and simple or long and brutally honest with this. Hmmm...
My job title is Senior Financial Analyst. Most people think that what I do is analyze the stock market or business trends. But I really don't do that. My dad always had trouble understanding what I really did, I think because it is hard to understand coming from the academic/non-business world. My days consist with different kinds of tasks depending on the time of the week, time of the month or time of the year. During the last couple days of a month and the first couple days of the following month, I work on closing the books for the areas of the company I'm responsible for. Currently the two areas I support contain 20-25 accounts; that's a lot compared to my peers, but they are smaller than the majority of what my peers have as well. Closing the books entails reviewing the numbers and how they match against expectations, making sure there's nothing missing that needs accounting entries for and making those entries, and providing explanations for differences between the actual numbers and what was expected. I then also give the reports each month of the numbers and explanations to the service managers so they can see how their accounts performed.
At various times throughout the year, I need to make forecasts and provide budgets for each of the areas and accounts. This means having to look at the trends as well as trying to predict where the customers will be months or a year or more from now. This is hard giving the changing economic and customer environments.
Other things I do for my job are creating pricing for new or renewing customer deals and contracts, review prospective changes to employees or other impacting costs, track how our accounts receivables are doing for each of the customers and assisting to pacify any potential issues there, and doing ad hoc reports for the company at various levels (German corporate, US corporate, service management, financial management, etc.)
There are things I like about the job, especially being able to help managers run their business and solve issues for them. But there are times I don't like the job, particularly when we do the same basic report ten times ten different ways because of a lack of standardization and communication.
So if you haven't fallen asleep by now, that's my exciting life... Now you know why I scrapbook!! Got to do something interesting each day, LOL!
