Tyler is the Accounting Supervisor at Steel Dynamics, one of the largest domestic steel producers and metals recyclers in the United States. Tyler advises all accounting students to take their CPA exams right out of college while their knowledge and study habits are still fresh. And to land your first job? Go to your career fair starting as a sophomore. Get the experience and exposure so it’ll be second-nature when you return as a junior!
Transcript
My name is Tyler Burns, I'm a CPA. I currently work for Steel Dynamics in accounting. I'm an accounting supervisor. My job entails processing invoices, or supervising the process of invoices comin' through. Month-end responsibilities, journal entries. We're a public company, so we have reporting requirements, so quarter-ends, year-ends, et cetera. We're a steel company, so we melt scrap to make our finished product. And we get scrap hauled in by truck and by rail, so every load of that has a weight associated with it, and we pay a price based on the market of the scrap in that period. So at month end, there's a reconciliation that needs done where there will be, it's called accounts payable aging. It'll be a report that shows all of our outstanding invoices that haven't been paid as of the end of the month, and that needs to match what your general ledger balance of your accounts payable shows, and if there's discrepancies, you gotta figure out what they are and reconcile the two. Great Plains is our software, so all of our invoices and our cash receipts and everything get posted into Great Plains, and then we have tools that we've built internally that will take data out of those systems and we can do reporting and run different queries and things like that. Filter down on the information that you want for whatever research you're doing. The way our reporting works, as of nine o'clock on the first business day of the month, that's kinda where we cut things off. So once nine o'clock hits, we're then looking back at the month, summarizing everything, and everything that we do during that first week of the month is to come up with a set of financial statements. We're a separate division, we operate independently, so we have to come up with our own financial statements and report those up to corporate. So there's all kinds of deadlines. Corporate needs our numbers by a certain date, and we kinda work backwards to figure out, okay, how do we get that amount of work done in the four days, or whatever. So the first week of a month is usually pretty busy. We're kind of under the gun to get things done in a timely manner, making sure everything's accurate, reviewing everything once, twice over, double checks, that sort of thing. And then it'll peak as well, at a quarter-end or a year-end, typically.
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