Pink Ritas and Lip Gloss

My last post went over pretty well explaining what I do that I thought I’d do another post since Q1 2008 has started. What does Q1 2008 mean? Well in simple terms, the year is split into four quarters for financial reporting purposes. Most companies follow the calendar year Jan-Dec with quarters beginning on January 1, April 1, July 1, and October 1. Others go by what is called a financial year and those can run any which way they want as long as they are for a 12 month period and are reasonable.

So Q1 has just finished and all of us auditors and financial reporting professionals are all gearing up for earnings releases which go out this week or next week depending on when companies decide they have finalized numbers and are ready to answer to the investors. They can release earnings any time before they file their quarterly report (aka 10-Q) with May 9th being the filing deadline for most large public companies. The quarterly report is basically an update on how the company did financially during the quarter, how did they do compared to last year, and what things are they planning on doing the rest of the year. They are normally short reads as well (70ish pages) compared to the gigantic 10-Ks though I don’t really recommend reading either for fun. If you do decide to read them check out the book Financial Fine Print first.

So what does that mean for your favorite auditor/blogger? Unfortunately, lots of long, late nights (8/9ish) for the next 2 weeks until we file but since my client hasn’t done much during Q1 it shouldn’t be too bad. Just the usual schedules and questions to ask and we should be good to go. Q2 though looks like a different story but most is related to our foreign counterparts so *knock on wood* it continues this way and I get another quiet quarter coming up. So after May 9th it will be some smoother sailing with just some smaller audits going on thru the end of May, June and July. Hope you enjoyed another installment of me and my job as an auditor.