Expand your thinking.... need some box cutters?

[Miroku]

I work at an environmental consulting firm. Lately, we've had some turnover in our accounting department, and everyone there is new. I am quickly beginning to get my fill of one girl, MJ, who cannot seem to think outside of her little box. One of my responsibilities is to arrange and oversee the transport and disposal/recycling of various hazardous wastes for clients, such as lead products, regulated hazardous wasted, non-regulated waste, and other stuff like fluorescent bulbs, high-intensity discharge bulbs, and such. Most of these are charged on a per-unit basis, either by the foot, the pound, or the bulb.

One of the transporters we deal with requires payment up front. The wastes they handle are usually in steel drums, they base their costs on the kind of waste and number of drums... so as long as I know it's, say, 2 drums of PCB oil, they can give me an exact price. MJ is the person I have to submit a check request to. Contrary to the way it's been done in the past, MJ decides now no checks will be written without an invoice. For the life of her, she never seems to be able to conceptualize how this transport company can price the work before it's even done, let alone expect money without an invoice. This also presents a problem when having to submit payment for processing fees required by government agencies, where you submit the fee with applications or information requests or whatever.

Today, I had a client that is trying to wrap up his costs for November. The project I am handling for him will run into December, but he would like to have most of the costs on the books for November. The estimate for the work to be done is $553, but it will depend on how many fluorescent bulbs he has (300 maximum). He would like to send $400 as payment in part, then be invoiced for the remainder of the work once it is completed. So, I check with MJ to see if this will work out. Personally, I don't see why not. But, again, this doesn't jive with MJ's view of the world where everything proceeds in the order of work-bill-pay.

So, I tell the client to go ahead and send it, rather than tell him "Well, our accounting girl can't get her brain around the idea that you want to send us money before we do the work that we're going to do anyway, so to hell with your record keeping."

I have to recognize that MJ is new here, and young enough to be new at the accounting game in general, and there is stuff about keeping our records straight I'm not aware of, but she seems to have no flexibility whatsoever. Whenever something like this comes up where the client would like to pay up front, or our subcontractors require money up front, MJ gets this look on her face like someone just shoved an ice pick in her brain and set off her allergies at the same time. Then, I have to explain to her how the work is performed.. and after about 5 minutes of the most rudimentary breakdown of the tasks possible, she still can't comprehend why someone would actually want to give us money or require money before work is done.

Now, whenver someone says "Oh, you have to see MJ about that," it pretty much interprets as "Use your best judgement, because no one here can really answer your question."

GRRAGH!

[Teranfirbt]

Hmmm, i hate people like that... i usually end up saying screw it and doing it myself, but that sounds like something you really couldnt do yourself....

[Miroku]

No, since I'm not in accounting. I try and keep in mind that she's part of a group that's trying to tighten up how things are done here... but still, when you need to break out a set of hand puppets to explain how partial payment up front is not beyond the realm of what's reasonable, it gets tiresome. In any new job, it's nice to have the freedom to do some things your way, but you have to adapt to the new place's ways as well. If it's not something that wastes or loses money, why mess with it too much?

With the client that wants to pay most of the money up front, at one point during my puppet show, she asks "Do you think he's a risk?"

A risk??????? The man wants to give us 72% of the total bill up front about 3 weeks before the work will be done. Yes.. he's a risk.. we're lucky if we ever see one penny from him. DYUHHHHHHHH.

[Circe]

Miroku: I can understand why she would not be wanting to do this, it will create more journal entries. However, I am thinking that your accounting department uses computers for this. Is this correct? I mean, even if they do this by hand, it is not THAT difficult. She will have to transfer the cash to the month of December, but that is pretty easy to do. Does MJ have much accounting background? Did she get her degree or her CPA? Furthermore, she sounds like an idiot to me if she is asking about the guy's risk factor. If you were to be doing the work for him on credit, yes, then you want to know if he is going to pay or not. Stupid people that don't know how to do some of the simplest accounting procedures should not be working in that field. Grah! That drives me nuts.

[Wizard]

Technically she's right. In the business world you're not supposed to do any work without a contract, and not supposed to send any money unless you have a bill. This does not mean the work needs to come before the bill, agreed, but if they want up front payment, why not just send an upfront bill? Don't even tell her the work is outstanding, just say "here's a bill, it needs to be paid." The guy who wants to pay in advance, tell her it's two stages of work, the first cost $400, and the next hasn't been completed yet, but they want their $400 bill now.
I find the best way of dealing with stupid people is to hide as much of the truth from them as possible, and use big words. Ignorance is bliss, especially when it's the other person who's ignorant and you can use that to your advantage.

[Miroku]

[quote="Wizard";p="223137"]I find the best way of dealing with stupid people is to hide as much of the truth from them as possible, and use big words. Ignorance is bliss, especially when it's the other person who's ignorant and you can use that to your advantage.[/quote]

It's a sad state of affairs, but with the environmental industry, a lot of it works on the grounds of "it's easier to beg forgiveness than to ask permission." If you try and get permission to do something the way you know it's supposed to be done, you can get caught up in all sorts of red tape and that could blow things beyond the time frame of the project. If you charge ahead and do things they way you're supposed to, you usually don't catch any flack, as the EPA and other agencies are happy to have one less headache to worry about. If, for some reason, you get someone looking at it that doesn't like some of the minutae, by that time it's too late to really do anything about it. That way, you still do stuff properly, and avoid any of the hastles some bureaucrat might throw your way because he lost his golf game that morning.