Associate Accountant, CliftonLarsenAllen LLP

My name is Emily Severson and I am an associate at CliftonLarsonAllen which is a public accounting firm. We kind of like call ourselves more of a professional services firm. So the position that I started out in, as an associate in the audit and tax sector, you are doing just that. You are performing audits or reviews of financial statements for companies. CLA specifically does only privately held companies. We don't do any publicly traded companies. So we go onsite to clients, basically gather all of their financial information and do an audit or review or a compilation of their financial statements. So it can kind of be different from client to client. That's the audit side of things. And then for the tax side of things it's prepping tax returns either for business' or for individuals. During busy season from January to April 15th, it's very busy. I'm working anywhere from 60 to 80 hours. We come in on Saturday's. But then it makes it all worth it because when you have a traditional busy season like that, the way my company works at least, is they're way more lax then during the summer. Almost everybody takes vacation off at the end of April. Or takes time off for vacation at the end of April. At least a week or two. And then, if you come into our office over the summer, it's very barren. Everything gets a little bit muddled sometimes when you have a client that's like, "Oh yeah yeah we're X amount done." And then you find out that they had all of these change orders that went through and then you have to go back and essentially make them redo their estimates because they want to make their financial statements look better than they are. There's a lot of due diligence that goes into it. I think it's fun because I like numbers. But not everybody thinks that would be a good time.