BerthaBlog

It’s nice to finally be on a career track. This spring I’m going to take a certified bookkeeper course at the local community college; by the time I’ve finished the course and taken the exams, I’ll have the two years’ work experience that is the other requirement. Maybe at some point I’ll go for a CPA—but to me, CPA means “really knows her shit,” and I’d like to feel a lot more confident that I do, in fact, really know my shit before going that route.

And at some point I’ll probably want a different job. I like my job now, and I really like the people I work with, but I’m really only working with one small aspect of the accounts. I’d like to keep the books for just one organization, and work with everything. When I was working for the church, I was doing receivables, payables, payroll, taxes, as well as all the filing, helping with the newsletter, keeping track of who signed up for their weekly supper, and so on. I really enjoyed it, and I’d like to eventually get back to something like that.

I’d especially like to work for a non-profit; between the training seminar and the research I did on my own while working for the church, I think I’ve got a pretty good handle on making the best use of Quickbooks in a nonprofit environment. And as long as I’m daydreaming, I’d like to work in a place that didn’t have a bookkeeper, or had one that wasn’t doing a very good job, so I can come in and straighten everything out and be the hero for once.

Maybe someday.

Busy week.

Getting the reports ready for the committee, I was going through all our bank accounts and reconciling them with the bank statements—and I discovered our restricted fund account was over nine thousand dollars short of what my records thought it should be.

I have to say, the committee reports kind of lost their place in my priority queue. I looked more closely at the bank records, and discovered that a transfer that had been entered in our books in May was never actually performed—someone had forgotten to go online and actually make the transfer. To make matters more confusing, half of the transfer had been manually checked as “cleared,” probably from a mistaken mouse click, so when we’d reconcile our accounts with the bank we were showing us having way more money than we did.

I double-checked everything several times, got all of our bank accounts reconciled properly, and finally was able to do the reports. Except now my reports have a note on them explaining why one account is suddenly almost ten thousand dollars lower than it was last month.

Church Boss asked me if this wasn’t the sort of thing that should have been spotted months ago, and I didn’t know what to say—I’m afraid this will make Cricket look bad, which is the last thing I want to do. Besides, if an experienced pro can make a mistake, a n00b like me is bound to at some point.

In December 2009, I finished all my classes required for the A.A.S. in Accounting. At that time, all the job postings required “one to two years of experience.” I sent résumés out on the theory that a two-year degree could arguably fill that requirement.

These days, the job ads are asking for five or six years of experience, or a Master’s in Accounting.

I did a little research on the prerequisites for the Master’s in Accounting at my local university. Turns out I have all but one of the required classes to enroll in their program. So I’ve signed up to take that one class this fall.

Of course, pursuing a Master’s will cost tens of thousands of dollars, which we currently do not have, and I’m not sure if we should invest that kind of money when I still don’t know if it will lead to an income. But I figure it never hurts to expand my options.

And when I go to class this fall, I’m pasting this on the cover of my notebook: