BLOG #21
As a new member of any company, especially as an Intern, you want to absorb as much information as you can and hustle to take on new responsibilities. The stigma for any Internship is that you will be brewing coffee, printing copies, running errands, and doing the work nobody else wants to do. It sounds boring and pointless, but its an opportunity to prove yourself.
Embrace it. Be the best Intern you can.
Every job has a purpose, even if it’s making sure the coffee pot is refilled. That coffee you created is directly correlated to improve office morale and productivity. Embrace doing the dirty work. Help clean up around the office without people asking you to do so.
Be efficient and productive with the work that is expected of you. Finish tasks that your supervisor gives you in a timely manner. Once you have downtime, brainstorm ways to add value without your supervisor telling you. Take initiative and see how you can help others in your department. This week during my Internship at Complete Payroll Solutions, my work during “downtime” was focused on designing a new website mock-up and refunding outstanding employee returns.
In the mornings during my internship, my energy is harnessed in the Finance department. My responsibilities include using Execupay Payroll 2018 Software, and Intuit Quickbooks to process Employee returns and notify Customer Service Reps (CSR), Wire transactions, Manual ACH’s, audit several bank accounts, and file paperwork. After finishing all my responsibilities for the week, I noticed there were about 20 Employee Returns outstanding from over a month ago. It is the responsibility of the CSR to return paperwork with a desired solution on the Employee return. Since the company is just sitting on that money, it was time to refund the clients since no action has been taken for over a month.
In all finance work, it is important to double check and look at journal entries. Through the Execupay and Quickbook platforms, I could identify for certain the outstanding returns, add them to a spreadsheet and pull the paperwork from the files. After gathering this information, I added the Manual ACH transactions to the general clearing account and added their journal entries via Quickbooks.
I created a spreadsheet displaying the Company Number, client name, date, and amount of the outstanding return and emailed it to notify the CSR’s about the outstanding returns and that they would to refunded to their respective clients on the next business day.
Taking initiative on this project helped to clear up outstanding funds in our company’s clearing account.
In the afternoon’s my work is done in the marketing department. My responsibilities include re-branding handouts, PowerPoint presentations, designing company fliers and advertisements, and redesigning documents using Adobe creative suite. Working closely with the marketing director has improved my skills in Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop. This past week I designed a mock-up homepage for the company’s website. Building a new website has been an ongoing project that the CEO wants to develop in the upcoming months. Therefore I decided to take some initiative on the project and provide some design elements that could be used in the future development of the website. In photoshop I created a mock-up for the home page and designed a series of business icons.
Here is the series of icons I designed using illustrator:
Here is a breakdown of my homepage mock-up using Photoshop:
This project help to provide valuable design elements and ideas for a new website and also serviced as a case study in payroll company branding. My research was focused on other payroll competitors branding and website designs. This mock-up not only implements the new company branding but is also restructures the old site framework to be more accessible.
As an intern, there will be demanding and tedious work to get done. Grind through it. Take advantage of those challenges. Understand why your work is important. What value is it adding to the company? Once you have reached your supervisor’s expectations, brainstorm how you can do more. Take initiative and find other ways you can add value.
-Jake Beman