Week 11 & 12

Approaching the end of internship Journey ...

(09/03/15 - 20/03/15)

Time flies, I have already worked in ERC Department as a finance intern for more than two month. No doubt, the knowledge and skills I learn and pick up is something that can’t be learned from books and it’s very valuable for my future career. I am confident to say that I did take the initiative to learn new thing whenever I finished job in hand. I am exposed to job tasks such as admin work, audit tasks and finance tasks given by my colleagues/ supervisor.

Apparently, due to the upcoming GST that going to be effectively launched in Malaysia at 1^st of April 2015, it had created pressure to my supervisor badly. She always need to plan her time and leave her office and go to Menara UOB for meeting and always stay late for her job. I do sympathies her therefore offer my help to her but she declare because her task could not be handle by me due to lack of experience and knowledge. Miss Joey felt the same way as me therefore she did try offer her a helping hand to guide and tutor me as I go through my internship program. She passed me a copy of User Procedures of Tax Invoices/ Credit Note and asks me to study during free-time and discuss with her once I done. Indeed, Joey is a good-hearted woman because despite having her own busy job task, she will still take some of her time willingly to teach me. To be honest, I have a much better understanding after the discussion.

A sample of tax invoice in case you have
 no idea how a tax invoice look like :)

There are two users involve in issuing tax invoice who are user creator and user approver. First of all, user creator is responsible to request from the customer, his account number and account type maintained with bank; or his UEN (Unique Entity Number). There will be two types of customers, namely existing customer or new customer. For existing customer, the user creator need to verify the accuracy of the customer’s information (Customer’s Name, Address, and Residence Country Code) obtained in order to extract the information by GSTS from the BWCIF database. If the information from BWCIF database is correct proceed to input the required key information into the “Transaction Customer-Add” screen which include of GST Account type, GL Contra Account, Payment terms (value), Payment term (D/M). If transaction to be processed is for a Credit Note, user should retrieve details by coding the Original Tax Invoice number. On the other hand, for new customer whose record does not exist in the BWCIF database, user must ensure that the key information of the customer is correctly input in the “Transaction Customer-Add” Screen. User must input the required tax invoice/ credit note details into the “Tax Invoices-Transaction Entry” screen and ensure that the Payment Date and Delivery date are correctly entered in order to allow the GSTS to determine the time of supply of transaction. Lastly, user creators are required to batch all tax invoices/credit notes created and submit to the authorized personnel for approval.

Here is where the user approver comes into the picture; they should verify the accuracy of all information on the tax invoices/credit notes created by user creator. If any error detected can be corrected, ones should indicate the changes required on the relevant tax invoice/credit note which will be routed to the creator for re-input. If the error detected cannot be corrected, the transaction will be rejected with reason stated, noted that no further changes by the creator are allowed. If the tax invoice less than or equal to RM200,000  will be approved by Approver 1 who are class 2 officer to Assistant Vice President while Approver 2 (Vice President and above) approve tax invoice that is more than RM 200,000. Before the end of each day (before 22;00 hrs), it is crucial that the user creator must check for any rejected batches form “Tax Invoices Maintenance Batch Header “ screen. Once the batches of tax invoice are approved, print out for onward dispatch to respective customer. The Time of Supply rule is crucial that user must ensure that tax invoices are issued and approved within the same month with the requirement of Delivery good/services performed and Payment received.

The above procedure and process of issuing tax invoice/credit note had taught me a valuable lesson that when you wanted to create a fully understandable procedure, the outcome are having a possibility of “Yes” or “No”. If “yes” what procedure should you proceed to if “no” what should you do next? After fully understanding the user procedure, I was thereby ask to assisting in preparing user procedure for GST statement so that I able to understand the process of issuing GST statement and the procedure of it.  I would say it is challenging but no doubt it gauges the understandability of mine in GST.

Beside from GST, I do help up in admin work, for instance update annual leave in the computer system of every each of the colleague. I was required to collect the leave of each of them in order to fill up their leave. I kinda like this kind of job task as I found it interesting as I able to interact and built relationship with colleague rather than sitting on my place. Apart from that, it do train my ability to deal with incorporate peoples as I do face problem such as chasing those who are busy with their work to fill up the annual leave required a lot of patient and consideration. As the more you push them is like giving them even more pressure.

Oh yeah! I would say that my colleagues were lucky enough to have a good boss (head of finance) in the department. Miss Neo is an important, effective, and integral part of our finance team. She takes the initiative to identify problems and devise solutions. Her role requires strong communication skills and she has shown that she not only has these skills, but she also has the ability to inspire respect and cooperation in teammates. She has shown that she is a very intelligent people with a well-suited to our finance department, entity reporting and control. She certainly had inspired me by the way she get thing completed and no doubt she had become one of my role model. The last boss of ERC, Miss Murni is a very nice person. She come back to ERC sometimes to have a chat with her friends( colleagues) and bring us the “Lou Sang” made by her. According to my colleague, every year they will have a “Lou Sang” event in the company conducted by Miss Murni. I was glad that I had the privilege to join this time ! Don’t you worry, picture was taken to show the cooking skills of this awesome lady! I could say I the celebration of Chinese New Year had bring a lot gathering within the department! The culture in the office is interesting as Chinese will treat Malays New Year's meal during Chinese New Year while Malay will treat Chinese during Hari Raya. I was so lucky to join the New Year gathering with all of them before I leave the department. Times were passing extremely fast,two more weeks to say bye bye to this bunch of lovely colleague! I started to feel the sadness of leaving them :’(

First ever group photo that fit everyone in the department :D 

Angpao from CFO & Supervisor :)
            Didn't expect this :)
               Appreciate from the bottom of my heart.

Asam Fish Set at Baba Can Cook in The Intermark

Ice Kacang ! Da Best :)

We are Happy Family <3

Key Learning:

Learn to allocate time in an effective manner

Sometimes I would be given a ton of task like checking invoice, reconciliation statement, reply GST Vendor and so on while sometimes I would be given nothing to work on. Soon, I realized that it was important for me to finish my task in a timely manner and then move on the next tasks to prove to my supervisor I capable to work under stress and reliable to handle a full workload.

Collaboration

One of the workplace values and ethics consist of teamwork in almost every industry. From ERC department, I could say the morale is high as everyone is working together eventhough their task is breaking up to particular area but overall all their task is linked to each other. I like the way they accepting responsibility when things go wrong, gathering the team and willingly working toward a resolution. This is one of the values that I should learn from them.