When the setup was more or less complete, I finally got the chance to get trained on my job activities. They told me that I would be in charge of recording sales and Lenny would be training me over the phone. After struggling trying to use the phone, he gave me instructions over email as well. The first thing I’d record was sales information from electronic payments. Lenny showed me where to find the sales data for our company. I had to find the data and then record the sales, refunds, and fees into sales receipts in the accounting system. The process took about 30 minutes to do because we had sales in 7 different currencies and each report had to be pulled up individually. On a daily basis, all the sales from the foreign currencies would be converted into US dollars and transferred to the US balance. I had to calculate the exchange rate for each of the transfers and record them into the accounting system. After recording the sales and transfers into the software, Lenny showed me where to find the information for chargebacks. Again, I had to pull up 7 different reports individually and record any information as journal entries into the software. This took an additional 20 minutes.
I finished entering the transactions and Lenny reviewed my work. When he saw that everything was acceptable, he proceeded to show me how to record sales from the second electronic payment account. We had a program where we would hire independent contractors to sell our products on our behalf. This would increase our sales and in turn, the contractions would earn a commission for everything they sold. Luckily, all of the agents only handled US currency. I logged into the company account and downloaded a report of all the transactions that occurred on the previous day. I was given a separate spreadsheet to identify all the contractors and I entered their sales receipts into the accounting system. Thankfully, I didn’t have to bother recording any transfers. After the second account was completed, Lenny showed me how to record the last account.
The last account for electronic payment was dedicated to our mobile recharge product. It was the easiest as there was only one currency to record sales data. I recorded the entry into the accounting system and completed the sales training for the day. Lenny explained to me that sales come in daily and have to be recorded on a daily basis. He hated Mondays in particular because he had to record three days worth of transactions for that day. Later on in the week, he would show me how to record the sales data from credit card transactions.
After my training with Lenny was completed, my boss came over to my desk and dropped a stack of documents down. It was full of invoices, bank statements, and other notices. All of the documents had to be scanned and emailed to the correct departments. He spent 20 minutes with me giving me email addresses and instructions on where to send the documents. He also asked me to come up with some sort of filing system to store all the paperwork. After completing several tasks, it was past 5pm so I left the office and started driving home.
Traffic going home was the most insufferable thing I experienced. My office was located right next to a highway off ramp which was right next to a major mall which was surrounded by several office buildings. During a one or two mile stretch, there were at least 8 traffic lights and traffic cops directing traffic. It took 45 minutes just to get to the interstate. After getting on the interstate, I experienced massive sand stills for another 30 minutes. I then realized that life would become incredibly miserable from here on out. After the commute was finished, I had spent close to two hours in traffic and it was almost 7 pm at night. Once again, this reinforced my decision to never get married or have children.
The next day at work, I had another training scheduled with Lenny. I logged into our company portal to pull out the reports needed to record credit card transactions. The first thing I had to do was filter the data and delete all the voided transactions. After than, I had to filter the spreadsheet by each merchant ID number and do separate filters to sort each currency out. I had to get the total native currency and total converted amount in order to calculate the exchange rate. After I had all that information, I’d enter it into the accounting system as invoices. We had two MID with multiple currencies and each one of those had at least four foreign currencies. This meant I did the sorting, conversions, and entries at least 8 times for foreign currencies. Including the invoices based in US dollars, these two MID required 12 invoices daily.
Two extra MID had me matching up different batch numbers and amounts to record another 6 invoices. Lastly, our independent contractor program had me record another 12 invoices into the accounting system. On a daily basis, I had to record about 30 invoices into the accounting system just to have all the credit card transactions finished. This process took me close to two hours in the beginning. The next thing he showed me how to do was record chargebacks for the credit card processor.
It wasn’t too difficult but I was confused the first few times because I didn’t really know how to perform vlookup very well. I downloaded the reports from the portal and compared the report with a chargeback report that we had in our internal systems. A vlookup would identify each transaction as the correct product and I would then record the entries in the accounting software. The first few times, I did this, I messed up the software and had to try again. By the time the first week had ended, I was feeling just dead tired.
At the end of Friday, I agreed to meet Allison and some of her friends for dinner. Already, I was in a foul mood from work that day, traffic was a nightmare, and I just wanted to go home. When I got to the restaurant, I ordered a dish which I couldn’t eat by mistake. It was covered with shrimp. I was irritated, I didn’t want to talk to any of Allison's friends, and I just sat there dwelling about how I screwed up my order. She asked me how I was doing and I told them I was miserable and couldn’t stand my job. They all kind of saw my irritation. After eating dinner, they were going to go somewhere else for dessert to which I just bailed and went home. After this point, I would just blow her off and not go out of my way for her.
I got home and finally got to enjoy myself a little bit. The weekend came and went in what felt like five minutes and I was back to work on Monday morning. Since it was Monday, I had to record three days worth of sales in the accounting software. Considering the fact that fully recording the chargebacks and sales for just one day would take three hours, I had nine hours of work to do just to record everything. Unfortunately, I could not just record one set of sales receipts and invoices. The deposits came in the bank on an individual daily basis so I had to also record the invoices individually or else the bank balance would not match with the accounting software balance. I had no other option but to just slog on through it. Despite all of this, my boss kept on throwing random unimportant tasks at me.
While I was trying to get all my work done, my boss asked me to order things for the office such as a mp3 player, speakers, office plants, and a coffee maker. I got a request to take care of customer service appreciation week which meant buying various food for customer service. He asked me to take care of ordering supplies and getting rid of supplies that we didn’t need. I even remember that he asked me for assistance in getting the access door to our office installed and figuring out how to work the card key system. I kept on thinking to myself how could the boss know how busy I was and why was he worried about unimportant stuff like mp3 players and office plants.
Eventually I completed recording all of the sales but it was getting close to six pm by the time I finished. The next day, I showed up to work and started recording the sales. Only about 45 minutes into the day, I get a message from the senior accountant telling me that the bank deposits were not matching up with the invoices I recorded the previous day. She asked me to review the invoices and figure out what was causing the difference. I had absolutely no idea what to do and had to ask her what the problem might have been. This is where stress and panic started to set in. I couldn’t proceed to complete my work until I corrected the previous three days of work. Barbara told me that there might have been an error when I calculated the exchange rate so I looked back to check the previous reports and calculations. The exchange rates were calculated correctly. Still puzzled, I had to ask Lenny what the problem might have been. However, it took me at least 15 minutes to get a hold of Lenny considering he was in Texas and working on his own tasks. I thought about asking my boss but he was on a phone call that could take 20 minutes to complete. I sat there frozen unable to do anything or have any idea how to resolve the issue.
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