#GradStories Kieran Organ, Graduate Fund Accountant at AlterDomus.

What are the main activities you do in a week?

On a day-to-day basis, I would be mainly processing payments for our clients. So that would involve getting invoices off them, then processing them and completing checklists for our audits. Then we book them on our accountancy software and record them in a spreadsheet. I also deal with general queries from clients. They might be looking for the excels that that we’re working on or financial statements or they might have other queries.

What skills do you need to be successful in your role?

The most important skill would be time management. In college you may develop the habit of putting things off till the last minute. That’s something you need to drop when you get a full-time job. You need to get stuff done and get it out of the way.

Communication skills are also important. If you don’t know how to do something, reach out to someone on your team. More often than not they’ve had the same problem as you and will know how to solve it instantly.

What advice would you have for a new graduate?

Write things down. When you’re on your first job, write stuff down, create a bank of information because you might forget how to do something. Take initiative, you'll have it there permanently and you can always fall back on it.

Good time management is important to develop. You might be able to keep up when you first get a job, but you’ll get to a point where you’ll be multitasking.

How have you adjusted to working from home?

I did a fully remote placement in college. At first it was tough learning a job from home and it was hard to adjust to. Now with Alter Domus, working from home is a blessing because I have to commute from Waterford to Cork. They give me the option to be flexible with coming up. So now the office is a nice place to be because it’s a place to be social.

How did you get into your job?

I did a general business degree in WIT (now SETU) and in third year I specialised in accounting. There wasn’t much in Waterford that suited what I was looking for. I stumbled on to Alter Domus on LinkedIn.

What do you love about your job?

I love the respect I get when I go in there. When I met the team and my manager, they all spoke to me like an equal. The environment was really accepting and that culture at Alter Domus is something I love about my job.