Wednesday, June 13, 2007
10:33 PM

Big deals?

Finally I get to blog about my work. I have the same old complaints about the meagre pay and the long trip from home to office early in the morning. Perhaps all these can be offset by a certain adrenaline rush on some days when I go to work, when I look forward to handling new deals coming in, or doing OT due to some analysis work. My colleague would say the learning curve is steep as he's from IT background; for me, it's not that steep cuz I've taken Corp Reporting, and it's very applicable to what I'm doing now, and I'm only handling work suited for an A.

Generally speaking, accounting firms have the Audit, Tax, Consulting and Financial Advisory Services departments. Under FAS comes the Forensic Accounting, Restructuring (law students would know), Corporate Finance and M&A Transactions Services. Under M&A lies a range of transaction services, from strategy to accounting/ financial/ legal/ tax due diligence to valuation. That's why all the financial ratios and free-cash-flow-to-firm comes in useful. When a company considers taking over a firm, such as a PE firm, or a private firm gunning for public listing, they come to us to do the required DD, on top of their own DD. If the deal goes through, they may hire us to do valuation well. After all we cost less than the IBs to do these, and the 神 of valuation in Singapore is in my company.

So what do I do? I wake up at 6.30am just so that I can eat, bathe, read papers, change, put makeup and catch the 7.40am bus, which brings me to the office at 8.45am. Then I take 15 min to switch on the freaking slow X24 before I start keying and churning out numbers and ratios, or normalise the EBITDA or adjust the balance sheets, or analyse the AR/ AP/ operating lease obligations or help to vet the reports. It's not that difficult but when I talk to my seniors, I realise that what they have is the sharpness of their eyes. Numbers seem to talk to them like words, while I have to comb through the whole statements to realise any discrepancies.

Now the client from US requested us to conduct audit on the target company, on top of what we had been doing. This DD is taking extra long, more than a month! These days I've been waking up slightly later, cuz I catch a cab to work in the target company on the other end of the island at Loyang! The cab fare is killing me, so I need my money back from the company!

The people in my department are fun and nice! All of them get to travel overseas for work very often, but travelling is tiring for many of them, since they prob only get to see the hotel room at 10pm after work and dip in the pool on the day of landing. Guess what, their weekends are burnt due to the travelling. But the idea of such a breathless and stressful trip simply gives me the adrenaline rush, which of cuz may be too early for me conclude.

There are the SAs who work the hardest and leave work at 9pm on the average. Count them lucky if there's a project that doesn't require them to stay in the office past 12am! Then there are the managers who work equally hard, but earn at least double the SAs. And the AD and Ds who can choose to work hard or not, but still earn at least 5 times the As. In the big 4, it seems like it's a competition of endurance and power play. The M&A industry is a growing and exciting one, so yes, I told my seniors that I'm seriously considering this line. But I still have 2 more years and I'm keeping my options open!

I'm looking fwd to many many things ahead, such as exchange next year. Would it be USA, Poland, Czech, Hungary, Germany or anywhere else?

Saturday, June 09, 2007
4:42 PM

summer dresses

Went for a short shopping trip for new shoes yesterday and saw this at Warehouse!

damn damn nice at a price of ~$130.
Love warehouse's dresses, love summer dresses, but i'm hard up on $$ so need to save up. >_<