Whew

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Sep 172010
 

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.

I R SRS BOOKPR

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Aug 062010
 

For the last couple of days, I’ve been doing month-end maintenance.

I’ve reconciled Quickbooks with the bank, and with the office manager’s records of donations to the church. I did the month-end entries and transfers. I printed the numerous reports that will be needed by the Stewardship Committee next week.

Cricket patiently walked me through the whole process; there’s a remote-login program installed so she can see what I’m doing from her computer, and she talked to me on the phone as I went through all the steps. I took copious notes as we went along. Frequently she would stop me and ask why we were doing this or that, or what I thought we should do next, making me think about it so she could be sure I was understanding the process.

My brain hurts. It was fantastic.

“You don’t even need me any more,” she moped as we were finishing up. Then she brightened. “Oh wait, next month is the end of the quarter—you’ll need me for that!”

Oh, yes. Yes, I will.

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Jul 302010
 

Finishing up my second full week. Cricket didn’t even bother coming in today. Yesterday she dropped by briefly to check on things and see how confident I felt about having her only come in one or two days a week.

“I think I’ve got a handle on the day-to-day stuff,” I told her.

“I agree,” she said, then sniffed, “y’all don’t need me any more.”

So she said she wasn’t going to bother coming in today, and stressed that I could call or e-mail her any time if I had a question about anything at all.

She didn’t miss much. It was a very slow day for us; I got one bill in the mail, and had a few things to file. I called a vendor to make sure they’d received a return, and spent the rest of my time helping the office manager with the little work she had to do. Toward afternoon the associate pastor made an appearance, and the three of us gathered in the kitchen and made sandwiches out of some leftovers from a recent event, and chatted about the church goings-on and our families and the weather.

They both tell me things will get much busier in the fall, when people return from vacations and the various church programs all start up again.

Bear