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What’s a Day in the Life of a Typical Audit Intern?

Posted on by Adrienne Gonzalez

The New Jersey Society of CPAs has a breakdown of an average day for an audit intern, and by average we mean very average. As in, arrive at the office at 9am and leave promptly at 5pm. Do you remember those days?

Let's see:

7:30am: Wake up, eat breakfast and get ready for work. 

8:20am: Leave the house and hope to not hit traffic. 

9:00am: Arrive at the client site. 

9:30am: Check emails and download up-to-date client files and binders.  

10:00am: Work on any assignments from the day before or any new assignments from your senior, such as typing out 10-Ks or updating engagement letters.  

11:00am: Send a message to other interns to see how their clients are going and to talk about the upcoming intern Olympics. Now is also a good time to start thinking about what you and your team want to eat for lunch. 

12:00pm: Finally, a place has been decided. Time to go out for lunch with your engagement team. 

1:00pm: Return to work and discuss your progress with your senior and ask any questions you’ve accumulated during the morning projects. 

1:30pm: Start creating confirmation letters, planning documents or any other assignments from your team. If you have free time, watch training videos to learn about different industries that may interest you.  

2:30pm: Email members of your intern case competition team to start thinking of ideas for your group presentation to the partners.  

2:45pm: Email your mentor with your client progress and fill out your upcoming goals.  

3:15pm: Organize files and make some copies for your team (after fiddling with the copy machine and printer for a few minutes). 

3:45pm: Work on Excel spreadsheets, check numbers, review work papers and learn all of the keyboard shortcuts you forgot from school.

4:30pm: Update your notebook with all of the tasks you completed today and create a “to-do” list for tomorrow. Also, fill out your time sheet ensuring you charged the client accurately.  

5:00pm: Pack up, go home for the night and get ready for tomorrow.

Assuming this is what you want to do with your life, make sure to focus on asking smart questions and "fitting in" — meaning if you're invited out to dinner with your team, go, even if you have a WoW raid scheduled for that evening. And if you're asked to go fetch a box of tickmarks, don't fall for it.

Really, you're going to be doing a lot of lunch-ordering and confirmation-sending, so the important thing if you're gunning for an offer is to be the best lunch orderer ever. After all, if you can't even manage to order lunch correctly, how are you going to work on a multi-million dollar audit?

If anyone has any tips for frightened interns or input on this schedule, go ahead and let 'em rip in the comments.

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Nothing unusual really, these things happen, clients usually grin and bear it but not our “international leisure travel group.”

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So it kinda sounds like their annoyance with the whole thing slowly boiled over into flat-out bitterness, leading to some increasingly unpleasant conversations. Sure, the directors in question would start out acting cool about it, “You know [chuckling], you really didn’t do us any favors there.” But eventually it became, “Boy, you’ve really outdone yourself, this time.” And finally, “For crissakes! You couldn’t leave it alone, couldja? [extremely patient KPMG partner explaining on the other end] What?!? [increasingly steamed, drumming fingers] We don’t care if it’s your job; we don’t like being embarrassed. [Pause, eyeroll] Stewards of generally accepted accounting principles?!? What does that even mean? [brief pause] Whatever, you can plan on us being uncooperative going forward.”

Or something like that.

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