This week Laird has welcomed some pupils from Wirral Met into different departments within the office to carry out Work Placements. We asked one pupil, Becky Penfold, who had been placed in our accounts department about her experience this week…
‘During my work experience at Whitfield Business Hub, I was fortunate enough to have experienced first-hand how accounting works in a business environment compared to the learning environment.’
‘On my first day I was given an ‘induction’, this included a tour during which I met everyone and learnt what each department does within the company. I also sat with different teams and learnt what they do on a day-to-day basis. After this and for the rest of the week I was with the Accounts department and paired up with Katie. I learnt how to do multiple things. I started off learning how to process payments from start to finish. I was then processing and paying invoices. By the end of the week I was processing engineers mileage, expenses and working out if VAT was reclaimable. At the start I did these with help but by the end of the week I was able to complete the tasks independently.’
‘On the first day I was a bit nervous coming into a new environment but after meeting everyone I realised I had nothing to be afraid of. Everyone I meet was lovely and seemed genuinely happy to meet me. Overall I had a great experience and met some lovely people.’
Becky has been given a number of tasks:
- Allocation of cheques and direct credits received
- Checking and processing invoices and making payments
- Journal entries and Journal reversals
- Scanning and saving remittances to relevant folders
- Checking DX postal addresses
- Checking and processing engineers mileage and expenses
- Banking the cheques
‘Each of these tasks Becky has been hands on and completed herself. I have sat with her and shown her what to do, explained the reasons behind each task and then allowed her to complete them on her own with my guidance when needed. Becky has shown great enthusiasm, listened well and paid close attention, she is a very polite young lady, has worked hard, shows absolute willingness to learn and has been a delight to work with.’ Katie Smith
Becky will be returning to Laird Accounts department in two weeks to begin voluntary experience once a week in between college in preparation for an Apprenticeship and to gain valuable knowledge ahead of others.
Well done Becky it’s been a pleasure and we look forward to having you on our team again soon!