Working Lunch

With the move back to Accounting, I learnt that there is a bi-weekly "Learn & Lunch" session for the whole team ranging from Singapore, Hong Kong and Beijing. We are eating lunch and having an informal sort of meeting/learning session for that 1 hour.

Suggestions was to maybe have it every 6 weeks or so but some say that it is too far apart.

Still clearing up shit from my predecessor and now, another new set of problem had emerged after I closed the system on Monday. It is the practise to print out a set of reports to review if there are any items that looks funny (amount too hugh or too low compared to last month) so imagine my surprise when I saw that my actual spending was showing negative amounts instead. Went to speak to the GLS accountant but he told me that there is nothing wrong with his entries as he HAD been passing them since he join the team about six months back.

Still feeling that something is wrong with the entries being passed. I asked to see his journal entries and guess what, he is passing the entries in a totally different way which is causing my system to show up as having negative spending. I explained to him that it is not correct to pass the entries this way but he starts to get defensive and that he have a lot of entries to pass if he were to do it the proper way. WTH, if you are passing the wrong entries and causing wrong data to be captured downstream, make sure you correct it. To say that you have a lot of entries to pass is really a dumb excuse. All accountants have to pass entries. It is just a matter of how many.

Seeing that I am not getting anywhere with him, I decide to wait a day before speaking to his supervisor because they are here to learn how to do things the right way before bring this work back to India. I am not going to let them mess up the data when they are back there.

His supervisor's final comment was that "see if corporate can help us in adjusting the previous 2 months entries". He kept emphasing to his boss that he have to pass more than 40 entries every month compared to some other accountants who needs to pass perhaps only 2 entries.

I know that corporate will not adjust the pass 2 to 3 months entries for us due to the fact that the system we are talking about pull data from GLS. This system don't generate data by itself. So if you cause the error, shouldn't you be the one who correct it?

Kept my new supervisor updated on this issue and he also agreed with me that corporate will not do the adjustments for us as they don't handle GLS at all. But I know that the accountant and his supervisor will try to get corporate to do something so I send the note to my contact asking her if she can help.

I am still waiting for her reply as she needs to consult her colleagues on this. Most probably we will be having a discussion sometime next week.