What is a typical day like? How numerical is accountancy in audit?

Days can vary quite a lot, as we're looking at various companies so we're generally situated on the client site, which could be anywhere in the country really. We will do the same type of work on different jobs. We're generally allocated a few accounts of the companies, for example cash, and we'll then carry out procedures that are the same for every cash account that we'll look at, regardless of job.

Accountancy is quite numerical as we're usually working with numbers, but as we document all of our work done there is quite a lot of writing involved too. I wouldn't rely too heavily on having done maths before as it's not an advanced level that's required for the basics and when you join you go to college and you're taught the more advanced parts of accounting as you go.

Hope this helps!

To add to this, at EY we follow a data-heavy approach to our audits and where possible we try to focus our procedures on quantitative/numerical data rather than more qualitative information.

This however doesn't mean that we spend all day crunching numbers and performing calculations. We use a lot of advanced software that can perform these mathematical procedures for us. I'd say the work we do is more focused on understanding the numbers, if we see that revenue has changed from last year, we need to understand the reason why this has changed. We can gain this understanding by performing further analysis with the data provided, or by performing probing enquiries to the client.

To summarise, yes we spend a lot of our days looking at numbers because we need to ensure that the numbers presented in the financial statements are correct. However that does not mean we spend all day performing mathematical calculations, the job involves a lot of analysis based on knowledge of the client, the industry, and the wider economy.

Completely agree with Luke.

To further this, I would note that although you spend a lot of time on Excel, the calculations we do tend to be of a more simplistic nature. The longer you work in audit, the less it becomes about the numbers and it becomes more about building an understanding and challenging what is in front of you.

I'd say that for every hour I spend on Excel, I spend another half hour in discussions with management (or with the team) trying to build an understanding of the processes. As Luke mentions, it is a financial job and so numbers will be a given. However, I would stress that they are not the only aspect of audit as it is a primarily client-facing job.

Building on what the others have said, I think that there is a big misconception that to be an accountant you must have studied maths/be really good with maths. Most of our work is completed in excel which is obviously just a huge calculator, but you don't need to have studied math's to be an accountant - I didn't!

It is a bit of a cliche to say that no two days are the same but i would say that its true at EY, normally in a week, I would work from our office for a few days, go to the client office for a day or two and spend the rest of the time working from home, depending on deadlines.

I think its really good to go onsite as you learn so much more about the client and their business and processes by being in their office, and you also get to build relationships with their finance team which is usually harder to do virtually.