Your logbook says posted transactions. Week one, posted transactions. Week nine, posted transactions. Now the department wants a whole report out of it, and you’ll say nothing happened at that placement. Something happened. Plenty happened, and this guide shows you where it’s hiding, whether your attachment was in a bank, an audit firm or the accounts office of an ordinary company.
It’s written for anybody putting together a SIWES report for accounting students to submit. For the full skeleton, title page to appendices, start with our complete SIWES report format guide. This post takes that structure as given and deals with the accounting side only.
The format in brief
Preliminary pages first: title page, certification, dedication, acknowledgement, abstract, table of contents. Then four or five chapters, and the experience chapter is the one carrying your marks. Then references and appendices. One thing before you type a word: your department’s format sheet wins. Not this post, not any template online, your department’s own sheet. SIWES itself is run by the Industrial Training Fund, but the report format belongs to your school, so collect that sheet from your SIWES unit first.
Where accounting students actually get placed
Banks, microfinance banks, audit firms, tax consultancies, the accounts department of a manufacturing company, a school bursary, a hospital accounts office, a state internal revenue office, an insurance company, and the bookkeeping corner of small businesses everywhere.
Each one gives you different material, and the first place reports fall down is Chapter Two, where students name the company and stop. “I was attached to an audit firm in Ibadan” tells the marker almost nothing. “I was attached to the audit and assurance unit of a firm of chartered accountants in Ibadan, which handles statutory audits for about thirty client companies, mostly schools, hotels and trading businesses.” Now that is a chapter starting properly. Name the unit, not just the company.
Turning posted transactions into evidence of learning
Write out every task you did, however small, then match each one to a topic from your coursework. That matching is the whole job. It’s what separates a strong SIWES report for accounting students from a weak one, because the marker is hunting for exactly that link and most reports never make it.
Look at what your ordinary tasks actually were. Filing payment vouchers, that’s source documents and the audit trail. Entering records into Sage, QuickBooks or Excel, that’s double entry happening on a real desk, so say which accounts you posted to and why. Helping with the bank reconciliation, that’s you explaining why the cash book and the bank statement disagree, with causes you met yourself: unpresented cheques, direct credits, bank charges. The petty cash box is the imprest system. Raising invoices is receivables and credit control. A stock count is inventory records and valuation. The PAYE or VAT schedule is your taxation course sitting on a real table in front of you. And if you were in an audit firm, all that vouching and casting and attending a client’s stock count, that is your audit course happening in the field.
You’re not inflating anything. You’re describing what you did in the language of the course you’re studying, and that is what the report exists to test.
What students write, and what to write instead
Weak: “I posted transactions into the system.” Instead: “I posted supplier invoices into the purchases ledger on Sage, matching each one to its approved payment voucher before entry, and I learned why an invoice without a voucher never gets posted.” Same task. One of them earns marks.
Weak: “I filed documents.” Instead: “I maintained the filing of payment vouchers in serial order, which is what makes it possible to trace any payment from the bank statement back to its approval. That trace is the audit trail I had only ever seen drawn on a whiteboard in class.”
Weak: “I went to the bank.” Instead: “I accompanied the accounts officer to lodge cheques and collect the statement used for the monthly reconciliation, and I saw why lodgements that cross month end become reconciling items.”
And one habit that spoils whole chapters: copying the logbook into the report week by week, so it reads like a diary. Nobody wants to read week seven twice. Group the placement into areas instead, payables, payroll, reconciliation, audit fieldwork, and write each area once, properly.
Numbers, documents and one full process
Three things lift a report above the pile. Numbers: how many vouchers a week, how many client files, how long the monthly reconciliation took, and estimates are fine when you call them estimates. Documents: a blank payment voucher, a requisition form or a reconciliation format in the appendix, each one referred to from the body of the experience chapter. And one process followed from start to finish, drawn as a simple flowchart. A payment request arrives, somebody approves it, somewhere it is recorded, somewhere it is filed. One clear diagram beats two pages of prose, and it is the thing markers remember.
Confidentiality matters more here than in any other course
Accounting placements put real money in front of you, and this is the one place you must not play. No customer’s name. No account number. No client’s actual figures in your worked examples. If you need numbers to show a posting or a reconciliation, invent round ones and say plainly they are illustrations. Describe the process, never the person or the amount. Your industry based supervisor will usually read the report before signing your logbook, so write every page like they will.
What the department is marking
Most departments are marking a SIWES report for accounting students on four things: how clearly you described the organisation and its structure, how well your tasks connect to financial accounting, cost accounting, taxation and auditing, whether one process was understood from end to end, and what your observations and recommendations say about you at the close.
Recommendations are where marks leak. “The firm should employ more staff” earns nothing, because anybody can write it without ever entering the building. “Vouchers above a set amount waited an average of three days for a single approving officer, and a second signatory for that band would clear the backlog.” Now that earns marks, because it proves you watched the system and thought about it.
A sample chapter opening
Here is one that works. Chapter Three, Experience Gained. “My industrial attachment was undertaken in the accounts department of a manufacturing company in Ogun State, which employs about 120 staff. The department handles supplier payments, payroll preparation, bank reconciliation and statutory remittances, and runs on Sage accounting software supported by Excel schedules. During the attachment I worked in turn on the payables desk, the payroll schedule and the monthly reconciliation, and this chapter describes the work carried out in each area and the skills gained.”
That paragraph names the unit, gives its size and functions, names the tools, and tells the reader how the chapter is organised. Everything else hangs off it.
The mistakes that sink a SIWES report for accounting students
Naming software without saying what you did inside it. Claiming work no student is ever given, like approving payments or signing off an audit, which a marker spots in one second. Copying the company profile from the website and calling it Chapter Two. Listing tasks with no link to any course topic. Reproducing confidential figures. And the biggest one, writing five months of posting as if nothing was learned, when double entry, reconciliation and the discipline of balancing to the kobo were happening in front of you every single day. You learned something there, plenty of it. The report is where you prove it.
Before you submit
Read the draft once as yourself and once as the marker. Every task tied to a course topic, one process drawn, one set of numbers given, one recommendation that could only have come from your own eyes. Then go back to the format guide and confirm the preliminary pages, numbering and references match your department’s sheet. If your course is business administration rather than accounting, the business administration guide is closer to your placement, and if you served in the IT unit, the computer science guide covers that ground.
And if the logbook is full but the report just refuses to come together, send us a message. Tell us where you were attached and what the department asked for, and we’ll tell you which parts of the placement to build the report around. No be today we dey do this.