Accounting and finance postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Every Monday morning I reconcile the weekend's takings for four pubs owned by the small group where I have worked since graduating. The tills, the card terminal reports and the bank deposits rarely agree on the first pass. Usually the gap is a timing difference, such as card payments settling a day late, but occasionally it is a refund keyed against the wrong site or a float that was never counted back in. Tracing these differences has taught me more about how accounting records are built than any single lecture did. It has also shown me how far I still am from understanding the judgements that sit above them. That is why I am applying for postgraduate study in accounting and finance.

My undergraduate degree was in economics, which gave me a solid grounding in microeconomics, econometrics and the basics of corporate finance. The module I enjoyed most introduced financial statement analysis. I found it satisfying that a set of accounts could be read as a series of decisions about recognition and measurement rather than as a fixed record of fact. I took an optional accounting module in my second year and achieved one of my higher marks. Since then I have tried to fill gaps on my own, working through an introductory textbook on IFRS and practising double entry on the group's own transactions where my manager allowed it.

My dissertation examined how small hospitality companies financed themselves through the pandemic. Using abbreviated and full accounts filed at Companies House for around forty firms, I compared the balance sheets before and after 2020, looking at government-backed loans, deferred VAT and changes in trade creditors. Much of the work was unglamorous. Small companies file limited information, so I had to be careful not to read too much into a single line. I learned to state the limits of my sample clearly. My conclusion was modest: the firms in my sample relied heavily on stretching payments to suppliers, and that pattern often persisted after support schemes ended. Writing it made me want to understand disclosure rules properly, and to know why some firms file so little.

In my job I prepare weekly cash flow forecasts for the finance manager, chase supplier invoices and update a spreadsheet tracking keg and food costs against sales. When energy prices rose, I helped compare costs per site so she could decide which kitchen opening hours were worth keeping. My role was mainly to gather and check the figures, but sitting in on that discussion showed me how numbers become decisions, and how much depends on whether they can be trusted.

Outside work I play club cricket, and for two seasons I have also kept the scorebook for our second eleven. Scoring is a careful, slightly obsessive job: the batting, bowling and extras columns must balance at the end of every innings, and an error early on can take an hour to find. I did not take it up for professional reasons, but I recognise the same habit of patient checking that I use on Monday mornings.

Through postgraduate study I hope to build a rigorous understanding of financial reporting, auditing and corporate finance theory, and to develop stronger quantitative skills for empirical work with company data. I am particularly interested in how reporting requirements differ for smaller entities and what that means for lenders and suppliers who rely on them. In the longer term I would like to pursue a professional accounting qualification and work in audit or advisory roles with small and medium-sized businesses. I bring a quantitative degree, a completed independent research project and practical experience of real, imperfect financial records, and I am ready for the demands of a more advanced and technical course.