What's your job about?
The Deloitte Assurance & Advisory team works closely with our clients to understand their operations and business to ensure that their financial statements are in line with audit standards.
To sum up my job as an audit analyst, it is similar to a financial statement investigator. I am tasked to carry out a variety of different things such as testing certain areas of the audit file, assisting in planning audit engagements and reporting any findings back to the audit manager/partner.
Being in audit, my work life is never the same each day as I could go from testing balances in the financial statements of large corporations to counting chickens on a farm as a stocktake for a start-up company. I have also worked with a wide range of clients across different industries, such as not-for-profit organisations, listed companies and even government organisations.
What's your background?
I lived a nomadic life, growing up in Auckland and moving to Christchurch then Rotorua, and even to my home country Samoa for a few years. I moved back to New Zealand for my secondary and tertiary education and graduated in 2021 with a Bachelors degree in Business from AUT; this was probably the highlight of my life as I am the first in the family to graduate from university. Whilst in my penultimate year at AUT, I applied for multiple internships and unfortunately was unsuccessful, however, I applied to a program called Tuputoa which offers Māori and Pacific Island students internships in the summer which landed me an interview with Deloitte. Since then, I received an offer as a graduate and have now been at Deloitte for 6 months and am loving every second of it.
Could someone with a different background do your job?
Yes, as long as you are able to meet the CAANZ entry requirements which can be found on the CAANZ website. You don’t have to do accounting to get into audit, all you need is a positive and can-do attitude!
What's the coolest thing about your job?
The two things I enjoy the most about my job are the people and variety of clients I get to work with. Being in audit, you will constantly be in different engagements and working with different people within the service line. I love the special activities we get to do as a team, such as team sports like netball and celebrating together at the end of an audit engagement. I also love traveling around New Zealand when I get assigned to a new engagement, so one week I could be in Ōtāhuhu and the next I could be up in Whangārei.
What are the limitations of your job?
Regarding audit, there are certain busy periods during the year where you may have to knuckle down and do the work. This is mainly because it is the end of the financial year for certain companies and so I may put in extra hours during this period to get my work completed and so I do not hold the team back.
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