Hi all, sorry it's been a few days but life got CRAZY yesterday! Mondays are my longest day at BBDO so far (in from 9:30-1:30), and in honor of that, Tom Krailing, the accountant who is chiefly in charge of ethics compliance and internal controls, started me off on my first assignment with teeth: performing the 4th-quarter Sarbanes-Oxley compliance audits for the company!! Needless to say, it has been a pretty crazy 48 hours between that, my PriceWaterhouse class, and regular class on top of it all.
Sarbanes-Oxley is already the bane of my existence, and I'm not even a real accountant yet! Since BBDO is a European company held under an American parent firm (Omnicom Media, the biggest media and marketing company in the world...), they still have to perform SBox audits (as they call it here, opposed to SarbOx in the US). This means a bit of a headache for everybody involved, especially as Omnicom designs the SBox testing for all their companies as if all their companies were specifically focused on advertising and marketing...which BBDO Europe is not.
What BBDO Europe IS, is the money-handler and sieve through which all funds in Europe are dispersed, collected, accounted for and allotted to every branch of BBDO in Europe, Africa and Asia. It's a bit nuts, needless to say, when I look over books I'm audit-checking and see that the balances in these accounts are for millions, even billions, of pounds, euro, dollars and God-only-knows what else...sort of weird to think about.
Anyway, I digress. The tests involve me printing off the long, long list of every invoice BBDO has received or issued between Oct and Dec of 2009. (To put this in perspective: the lists simply numbering the invoices printed out to 50 pages each. TONS of invoices.) Then I go online, get assigned random numbers that I have to match to invoices, and have to check that each invoice matches and complies with a series of controls, such as who has signed off on them, who is being billed for the invoice, whether the invoices were entered into the appropriate ledgers at the appropriate times, etc. There are five tests for accounts receivable and five for accounts payable, and it took me literally all day yesterday and today to get just THREE tests done :( This is going to be a huge project for me! Still, it's fun, challenging and is offering me a great look into how real companies have to deal with Sarbanes-Oxley, which is such a huge part of accounting all over the world today.
On a less boring, accounting-y note, I LOVE "Images of Britain Through The Arts!" This is the mandatory class that all students in the London Program have to take, and involves a once-a-week seminar about the various forms of art (painting, music, film, theater, opera, dance, etc.), as well as two half-semester classes on two of these art forms. Today I had my seminar AND my first-half class, Opera In London. The seminar professor is super-energetic and fascinating...today we discussed the phenomenon of celebrity/power/fame/glamour and how the media can inflame that, then framed that by discussing Princess Diana's death and the AWESOME movie "The Queen." If you haven't seen it I highly recommend it! In Opera In London, we spend every class listening to and discussing the plot of the first opera we will be seeing, "The Rake's Progress" by Stravinsky. It's phenomenal, and I can't wait to see it live. The class also includes a backstage tour of the Covent Garden Operahouse, which is going to be so cool I may just die of cardiac arrest and excitement.
Hmm, I think I've written enough for now and I have another 1/2 a Facebook photo album to tag and caption, so I'm going to be done for now! Sorry this particular entry is so BBDO-ey and so light on actual London fun, but I promise I will be better next time and not bore you all to tears with the tales of a struggle-fest intern :) Cheerio!
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