Leadership
I think I really improved my leadership skills a lot within just about a month of Spectrum being up and running. As our workload in the accounting/finance department has increased, I've gotten lots of opportunities to collaborate with the other accounting/finance specialists on our tasks, delegate work with other specialists, and solve any problems that arise. For instance, if there's a task that needs to be done, but no one's taking responsibility for it, I try my best to step up and get the job done. While we were putting together the business plan, I helped delegate different tasks that our department had to complete for the plan. I had to calculate different ratios that were crucial in projecting the company's ability to handle cash and spend money on expenses. It was so important that everyone completed their work because some of the tasks corresponded with each other and we couldn't complete one of them unless we completed a different one first. So far, Spectrum has attended two trade shows and we're preparing for two more towards the end of this school year. These trade shows have played a big role in developing my leadership skills. With a trade show there will always be some sort of obstacle or issue that arises, and attending these trade shows has helped me work with others to solve the issue at hand. The deadlines our department has to meet for each trade show has also helped me learn the importance of being proactive and making sure everyone else in the department is moving along with their work. The fact that we didn't have a CFO for much of the first semester, also helped me a lot in building up my leadership skills. Without a CFO, it's crucial that all of the specialists are able to work on their own and complete tasks without direct guidance. In the future, I can work harder with my group to make sure everyone has a clear, specific task before the day starts or even before the week starts.
Professional
Being a part of Spectrum has helped so much with improving my professional accountability skills. Most days we have some sort of deadline to meet whether it involves journalizing our sales, managing inventory, or making purchases for the company. The company relies on everyone to complete their daily tasks/goals. Having a goal to meet has helped positively influence my work ethic. For example before we could make any sales, the finance department had to create ledgers that track the monthly progress of our accounts. I used the information I've learned from my accounting classes to make sure the ledgers were properly set up and included specific components like the account number, the date, and the balance columns just to name a few. I've also found that my interactions with other team members are efficient and we're often on the same page, going back to the idea of having a collective goal to meet. Every once and a while I find myself working on other classwork during the period. One of my main goals is to stop doing that completely because it isn't very fair to my coworkers and on top of that, it definitely isn't professional to be focused on something other than my task for the day.
Functional
Since Spectrum started making sales, I've learned a lot about all areas of a business. I've worked with members from every other department, so I have a pretty good understanding of mostly everyone's job. Since this is the capstone business course at Neuqua Valley, I've already taken a wide variety of business classes, so I think that has also helped me a lot in being able to get the job done. For instance, without the accounting classes that I've already taken, I wouldn't have been able to go into this department at all because that class taught me the basic skills. In December, we've gotten an increase in sales with the introduction of new packages. To keep a record of the sales, I had to make journal entries for each sale in our cash receipts journal. I used the same exact methods that I learned in accounting class to complete this task. Hopefully in the future, I can learn from the other accounting specialists how to do some other tasks in our department - like doing payroll. It's always a good idea to learn how to do a new job, especially if someone's absent, I can always jump in and help get it done.
Core Technology
Technology is a huge part of Spectrum's daily functions, especially in the accounting/finance department. We don't use any accounting-specific programs like QuickBooks, although we do use Google programs - mainly Google Sheets - to keep our financial records organized. Google Sheets is crucial to our ability to efficiently record transactions in our journals and ledgers. There are multiple functions that I had to learn in Google Sheets that help us with math related things, for example, the "=sum" function adds together the values of different cells. Rather than adding together each individual cell, you can just select all of the cells to be added together at once. Learning the various functions has increased my productivity on basically every project we've had to do that involves some sort of math.