Sucked Back Into Accounting
In my previous life, I was in Accounting. Really glamorous, especially because I was just into Fixed Assets Accounting. If you know what that actually means, I'm sorry for you but you can appreciate how boring it is.
There are two of us in the IT department that have Accounting in our backgrounds and we get sucked into all of the debit and credit issues. On Monday, we started researching a $10K difference between our retail inventory reported value on hand and the general ledger. That kept us there until 8 that night.
Yesterday, I found out there was a $200K discrepancy in another inventory account. I let my compadre deal with the original problem and dove into the bigger issue. She ended up having to get our big boss involved and they've resolved some of the $10K. I spent the day telling people to leave me alone because I needed to find $200,000. For the most part, that excuse worked, too. I'm going to have to remember that one.
I was pretty much on my own with the $200K. I did have some peeps checking out some stuff and our Finance people were scrounging but I left work at 7 last night with the issue still outstanding. I didn't sleep well at all because I had ideas about journal entries and part data whipping through my head.
Taking up the task again this morning before I even got into work, I chased my tail for a while then headed into the office. I finally dumped every transaction to the inventory account (10,000 or so) into an Excel spreadsheet and started sorting and scanning.
I found it around 10 this morning. Finance had made some corrections to something IT had goofed and fixed, too, so we were overstating our balance. It took me some time to persuade the Finance guy that I'd found it but he bought in to my theory.
Being the humble person that I am, I walked through the department saying, "I am a genius!"
I felt like a genius, too. Tomorrow, however, I'm sure I'll do something blockheaded and everything will be back to normal.
There are two of us in the IT department that have Accounting in our backgrounds and we get sucked into all of the debit and credit issues. On Monday, we started researching a $10K difference between our retail inventory reported value on hand and the general ledger. That kept us there until 8 that night.
Yesterday, I found out there was a $200K discrepancy in another inventory account. I let my compadre deal with the original problem and dove into the bigger issue. She ended up having to get our big boss involved and they've resolved some of the $10K. I spent the day telling people to leave me alone because I needed to find $200,000. For the most part, that excuse worked, too. I'm going to have to remember that one.
I was pretty much on my own with the $200K. I did have some peeps checking out some stuff and our Finance people were scrounging but I left work at 7 last night with the issue still outstanding. I didn't sleep well at all because I had ideas about journal entries and part data whipping through my head.
Taking up the task again this morning before I even got into work, I chased my tail for a while then headed into the office. I finally dumped every transaction to the inventory account (10,000 or so) into an Excel spreadsheet and started sorting and scanning.
I found it around 10 this morning. Finance had made some corrections to something IT had goofed and fixed, too, so we were overstating our balance. It took me some time to persuade the Finance guy that I'd found it but he bought in to my theory.
Being the humble person that I am, I walked through the department saying, "I am a genius!"
I felt like a genius, too. Tomorrow, however, I'm sure I'll do something blockheaded and everything will be back to normal.
