News from our apprentice - blog 13

This month saw a move into the Accounts Department, which I enjoyed very much. I learnt about the Purchasing and Sales Ledger; what they do day to day in their roles. It was really interesting to gain an understanding and learn about how a business operates in terms of finances. This included learning about the budget, how it is generated and amended during the planning process. It's interesting to see where money goes to keep a business up and running. As you may know, if you read my blogs regularly, I’m very comfortable with and enjoy mathematics, so all of the Excel work I did was easy for me, such as inputting data from bank statements, payroll, overtime data etc.

Tax codes were explained to me, which was helpful to understand, also profit and loss and how we update it. I also helped with some work on our current fixed asset register, based on what’s in the factory. I learnt about depreciation of our cars, machinery etc and went through the fixed asset register to check recent purchases had been added to the correct section of the report, as well as removing items that we no longer have, as we often replace old equipment.

I’m now back in R&D continuing with my project tasks. I’m also finalising designs I’m putting together for one of my BTEC projects, so that I can make a final proposal for implementing my ideas. I also have NVQ work to finish off and am due to be observed by my NVQ Assessor, in which I’ll likely perform an oil change on one of our guillotine machines.

I’ve also been doing a lot of work on the OGP writing routines as we now have the ability to add in formulas to auto-generate reports such as ISIRs without having to manually input the data.

The new programme allows us to set up a template based on a routine, which provides the data for auto-generating reports. We can also use this for CpK and elements of PPAP for example. It is a much quicker process now and will save us a lot of time.