Eventually, Lenny got back to me and took a look at the previous reports. What had happened was that I forgot to delete the voided transactions before I recorded the sales. This threw off the exchange rate and the total sales amount so I had to look back at the data for the previous three days and correct the invoices affected. It was a Tuesday and I had my weekly meeting with my boss. He said it was okay if I made some mistakes while learning, however he kept on throwing more stuff at me to do and complete. During my first two weeks at the company, I came to the conclusion that completing all the necessary work for a week would be impossible to do within 40 hours. I’d have to say an extra hour or two a day and take a 10 minute lunch break just to have a chance to complete everything. Effectively, I’d be working 45 to 50 hours every week but I wouldn’t get any extra compensation because I was on salary. I was stuck and trapped. It was either this or be unemployed.
Having a weekly meeting with my boss was a new experience. None of my previous jobs had such engagement and feedback. Unfortunately, these meetings would be when my boss would chew me out for screwing something up, doing something wrong, or not doing something that he expected me to do but never told me to do. The weekly meeting was usually a low point of the week for me.
In addition to a one on one weekly meeting, we also had a weekly meeting for Finance to discuss new developments, concerns, and vacation time for the staff. I usually felt like these meetings were a waste of time however I did like to have a reason to take a break from my work flow. Usually, most of the points of the meeting did not affect me or my daily tasks so I would zone out for a while until the meeting was over.
During the rest of that week, I was giving the task of learning how to cover Barbara’s work so that she could take a vacation. At the time, Barbara was in charge of two different tasks that had to be done on a daily basis. The first was to update our telecom vendor balances and the second task was to update the bank account balances and make sure it matches to our accounting software.
Our company is a retail company and buys phone service from large carriers wholesale. We then break up the service and sell it to the end customer for a profit. This is the entire business model. Our telecom team searches for carriers that will give us the best offers and as a result, we do business with more than 15 telecom carriers. To get the phone service (our inventory), we either pay our vendors in advance or on a set schedule. On a daily basis, our IT department sends us a report of how much service was used for each vendor and we use that information to update our balances for each telecom carrier. We do this so that we know when to pay our vendors and how much time we have before we have to make a payment. It is very important for these values to be updated daily because there could be an instance where our balance is running low for a vendor or if we are about to exceed our credit limit with our vendor.
The process was simple. Every vendor we updated had a bill entered into the accounting system and I would add a new row to the bill to indicate the usage of the previous day. I then took the updated balance and plugged it into a report to see if we were close to needing to make a payment. The second task was far more complicated.
The second task was to update the banks. To do this, I had to log into the accounting system and go to the banking feature. The banking feature was connected to the banks we used and it allowed us to download daily reports from our banks. After downloading several reports, the transactions would be listed and I’d have to match them with the invoices that were entered into the accounting system. The tricky thing about the process is that multiple deposits came in per day and none of them were labeled. In order to identify a deposit with an invoice, I had to enter in the exchange rate onto the deposit to convert the USD amount to the foreign currency and then I could match it with a foreign invoice. If an invoice was not matched to any deposit, it was a clear indication that something might have been wrong with the invoice. The amount might be off or the exchange rate may have been entered incorrectly. With over 30 deposits to match per day, it was a little difficult to remember all how all the deposits would be applied to the invoices. A particular annoying case is that a certain credit card likes to act different from the rest of the credit cards that we accept. This type of credit card would settle into our bank account two days after the rest of the cards so this was something I had to take into consideration. However, I remember the most difficult part of updating the bank accounts was after payments were made. Payments made by wire transfer would be debited from our bank account individually but ACH payments were all lumped into one sum. In that case, I would have to identify all the vendors that were paid then mark all the vendors invoices as paid in the accounting system. In order to know if I did the update properly, I would check to see if the balance in our bank accounts matched the balance in the accounting system.
Of course, the first time I tried to update the banks, I had my issues. I always had to double check to see that I put the correct date and exchange rate on each payment application. There were also a number of transactions that I didn’t know how to match and there were a few times when I forgot how to classify an entry. I always dreaded when Barbara would take a vacation because updating the banks took me at least 3 hours to complete.
In a weekly meeting, my boss mentioned to me that Lenny would start showing me how to perform the month end closing activities. The boss mentioned that closing was usually a long and tiring process and I should expect to be working about 50 hours a week during the month end closing. I was very overwhelmed by this but at least Memorial Day was coming up. I would have a three day weekend at the end of May.
I enjoyed my three day weekend only to arrive at work on Tuesday to the horror of realizing that I had to record four days of sales. It felt like I could never get a break. Even if I had a holiday or a day off, the work still needed to get done one way or another. I came to the conclusion that I’d have to work on the weekends just to have any hope of getting everything done. At some point in the day, my boss took pity on me and said that I could split the workload between two days and this helped me out. I was still recording sales for the entire day though.
When June rolled around, Lenny sent me an email and started to train me on the month end closing activities. Unfortunately, our phones were horrible and I could only pick up half of what he was saying to begin with. We had to continue to communicate through instant messages online.
Since this was my first closing, Lenny would be walking me through it the whole way and demonstrating everything. The first thing he asked me to do was download all of the reports for the credit card processor and upload them to the company shared drive. I would use these statements to reconcile the customer MIDs with the invoices recorded to the accounting software. The biggest challenge I had here was that the documents could not be downloaded as spreadsheets so the text had to be copied and pasted into a spreadsheet. Furthermore, the spreadsheet had to be manipulated to get all the text in the proper columns and the dates aligned to even use the data to begin with. Unfortunately, Lenny and I were using two different softwares for spreadsheets so some of his instructions did not work when I tried to do them. We spent at least 15 or 20 minutes trying to resolve formatting errors in my spreadsheet. After the errors were resolved, I could proceed to follow his instructions. In the accounting software, I could download a report of all the invoices for a specific customer MID and then I would compare it with the statement I downloaded earlier. In a new spreadsheet, I placed the statement settlements on the left side and the accounting software date on the right side and I matched each day up to make sure there were no differences. Lenny only showed me how to reconcile the easiest MID for the sake of time. The MID had only USD settlements and only one batch per day.
The second thing on my list was to record depreciation entries. Since our business was 100% online retail, the only equipment we had to depreciate were the laptops in our offices and a few switches that we had in two datacenters. The method used was straight line depreciation so I would update the dates from the previous document, copy and paste the prior balances as the current balances, and then update the formulas for each field. After the spreadsheet was done, I’d enter the journal entries for depreciation expense into the accounting system.
The third item on my list was to record two reclassification entries. In order to save time recording sales, we had all of the sales revenue recorded directly to one general product on a daily basis. At the end of the month, we would run our internal reports to see a breakdown of the products we actually sold and then we would reclassify the total sales to the individual product. The same process had to be done with our exchange gain or loss for the month. After the spreadsheets were finished for both journal entries, I’d record both entries into our accounting system.
The last part of the closing process was to record all the offline sales and commission transactions for our independent contractors. Right off the bat, Lenny told me he hated this process. He sent me a template to use for recording these entries. I logged into our internal system to look for the reports and I saw a list of about 100 independent contractors. Immediately, Lenny told me that only half of the contractors were active however I would have to run the report individually for each contractor. After the report was run, I’d have to copy and paste the information into the template on my spreadsheet and then record the journal entry into the accounting system. If the template showed any offline sales, I would also have to record an invoice for the contractor and apply a payment to the invoice. The process was long and cumbersome but we didn’t know a more efficient way of doing things. It took two to three hours to record 50 journal entries and 30 invoices for all of the contractors.
After all the transactions were completed, it felt like my mind was turned into mush. I still had to update two reports regarding transaction fees and the overall breakdown of sales so I just listened to Lenny’s instructions as best as I could. After the first week of June, the month end closing was completed and I just wanted to forget about the misery endured.
I looked out the window of the office to see a brown building in the distance. I wondered if it was the building that Julia worked in. I realized that my office was close to the major mall that she worked next to.
In June, I tried taking my laptop home a few times on the weekend in order to stay on top of my work load. If I got done recording sales over the weekend, I wouldn’t have to endure recording three days of sales every Monday. I felt resentful for having to work 6 hours on the weekend but I was willing to put up with it just to keep making money. Sometime during June, I had finally saved up $40000.
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