My Experience as A Finance Consultant

Hi there! Now I would like to tell you about my short experience as a finance consultant at Accounting Development Center FEB UI (Faculty of Economic and Business University of Indonesia). I said it as a "short" experience because I had worked there for only 4 months, since November 2018 until February 2018. 

As you know, my previous job was an auditor at KPMG. There are a lot of differences that I have found between an auditor and a consultant, yet there are also some similarities between these two. 

The similarities are as follows :

• Both of these jobs require us to adapt to the new working environment easily since almost every month we will be placed to the new client engagements. 
• Both of these jobs also have a tight deadline so we will get used to working overnight. 

The differences between these two are : 

1. As an auditor, sometimes we will find any conflicts with our clients. It's very common because the nature of our job is to make sure that our clients didn't create material and/or significant misstatements in their financial statements, so basically we need to improve our professional skepticism. Meanwhile, as a consultant, we really need to build a good working term with our client and we avoid any conflicts with our clients because we need to compromise our view with their view so that we could understand what they want exactly. 
2. As an auditor, our working guideline is Generally Accepted Accounting Standard which is used in each country. On the other hand, as a consultant, our working guideline is corporate governance concept and client's need.
3. As an auditor, we only check their financial statement and we're responsible only for informing the client about their misstatements. They will solve the issue by them self. However, as a consultant, we're not only responsible for communicating the issue within the company, but we also recommend them about how to solve this issue properly according to corporate governance concept.
4. As an auditor, the result of our work is our working paper which is only monitored by our manager. However, as a consultant, our work result is a recommendation and we need to present the idea to our client. To sum up, we need to perform extra effort to tidy up our work since we need to make our client understand about our idea comfortably.

  That's why, I found many difficulties when I started my work as a consultant since I got used to use auditor documentation which is not familiar to many people. However, luckily I didn't find any difficulties to build a good working term and to understand good corporate governance concept. In term of give recommendation to our clients, I still need to consult with some experts in Accounting Development Center FEB UI. It's tough but actually the working load is less than my working load in KPMG. And I was very happy since I could get a different experience and meet many experts in their own fields.