BerthaBlog

He had one account to work on today. A fairly easy one, just one bank account and not a lot of invoices or cash receipts to sift through.

It took him all morning.

He still did it wrong.

He spent the afternoon attempting to correct it, but my supervisor and I will have to go through it and check things.

Earlier this week he mentioned that before working here, he’d had a job entering receivables for about six months. I think he learned on the job, and is familiar with how his previous workplace did things but doesn’t have a strong grasp of why, so now he’s having trouble learning a new way of doing things.

But on the schadenfreude side, I now have evidence that if I were screwing up, my supervisor would not hesitate to tell me about it.

So far, so good. I’ve gotten settled in to the CPA’s office, where I have an actual room with a door and a window. I share the room with another girl who does the taxes, but she only comes in on Wednesday so mostly I have it all to myself.

The CPA’s clients send us all their paperwork, and my job is to get it all into Quickbooks so we can run reports and keep track of it. Sometimes they send us all their stuff in a tidy, organized little pile, and sometimes it’s kind of random with loose receipts everywhere and once I get it sorted I discover the bank statements are missing and we have to wait on those. Most of the time the transactions I enter are to vendors that are already in Quickbooks, so I don’t have to figure out how to allocate them. Now and then I get to enter a whole new client, which means I have to go through their invoices to figure out what a vendor sold them and how it should be dealt with. I also go through all the loose receipts they send us to find the ones where they paid in cash, so they get credit for all the money they spent for business purposes.

It’s all pretty straightforward. By the end of the week I felt like I had a handle on it, and that I was doing a good job and they would be happy with me and want to keep me on. On the other hand, I thought the same thing about my job at the church, right up until the day they told me I was being laid off. So I vacillate between feeling confident that I’m doing a good job, and worried that I’ll get called to the boss’s office and let go because they decided it wasn’t working out. I guess this is a normal reaction for people who have been let go of a job.

All the ladies I work with are great. Only one of them besides me isn’t bilingual; all the others switch easily between Spanish and English. Sometimes if an invoice is in Spanish, I’ll double-check with one of the other ladies that I’m reading it right.

I want to be bilingual too. I barely remember my one semester of Spanish three years ago. I tried to sign up for “Spanish in the Workplace” at the local college, but it’s already full. Maybe next semester I can get in. Assuming I haven’t gotten laid off by next semester.