subject: Understanding My Internship with Accounting [print this page] In the past summer of 2010 I was involved in an internship where I was promised more money than I would have to spend. In order to avoid conflict with the internship program, its name will remain confident. Through the knowledge of first year accounting at West Chester University I learned the ins and outs of how to organize accounts receivable and payable through the usage of ledger entries to the balance sheet and etc. Before I make the comparison between what I learned and how it helped me I want to talk a little bit about what the internship claimed to offer. It claimed to be different than other internships because it granted me the opportunity to run my own business and make a ton of money which other internships don't offer. This all sounding great to me, being a sophomore with the motive to engage in an internship, was the beginning of an extensive learning process.
As the internship was about 2 months in I had realized I invested more money than I had received. But I placed my trust in the internship and stuck with it because I believed good things would come out of it. I was required to do a lot of spending in this internship which allowed me to practice my use of inventory organization learned in accounting. The materials I was purchasing acted as a credit to a temporary account that the internship created for me. The deal was that they would start me out with an account in which I could use to purchase materials until I reach profit. As I noted my spending and my account balances in both my account and the companies account I noticed a very small increase in my company account and a rapid decrease in my own personal spending account which decrease because of the gas I had to purchase. Another huge hit on the companies account was the 40 percent overhead that they would take from all the work I had completed. This left me no profit at all.
The big problem is that my accounts receivable much less then my accounts payable. In order to run a successful business the cost of goods or services sold needs to be much more then the accounts payable. Once I realized I had this problem with about a month left of summer I made the decision that the internship set me to either succeed or fail on my own and that they weren't going to help me. I don't like to except failure but the service provide wasn't exactly an easy task. Through organization of everything I had purchased and all the money I had coming in, thanks to basic accounting skills I was able to avoid a worse problem which was losing money from a business that I had to run when I'm only 20. So now in the future if I ever decide to start one I will know what to avoid.
