Introduction - Who am I?

Hi there and welcome to my blog! My name is Alex O'Connor and I did my work placement in EY (Tax). It was an invaluable experience as i got so much exposure to the vast array of information systems that they use.

The first of which I was introduced to was the whole area around timesheets. Timesheets store all of the data relating to the work carried out everyday and consisted of 36.5 hours inputted for my working week. How it works is we have 2 types of codes to enter to fill our time. The first of which is internal codes for any other non-client based work.

The other type of codes we used to input our time was client based time. We used another information system to create these codes for every client and set up new codes for every financial year. This was a very useful tool to be able to track how much time was spent doing certain work and makes it much easier for managers to price the work the following year knowing the costs associated with working for the client. As an intern a lot of my time was spent in creating these codes.

Another information system I used frequently was Alphatax. Alphatax is the market leading corporation tax software and is an extremely powerful information system. It is used from the stage of collecting raw data all the way to completing a tax computation. As the application is constantly evolving due to the ever-changing landscape of tax, EY often holds trainings which run firm-wide across the Irish tax offices on Microsoft Teams. While this would be costly to implement it increases employees understanding of how to use the software and increases efficiency in the long run. These trainings are conducted by experts who work for Alphatax so they are very comprehensive.