What DOES Chandler do?

Molly and I were talking over email today and she says this to me:

BTW…I’ve always seen your email address and I’ve meant to ask, but never got around to it – what exactly do you DO in your corporate job? I tend to think of it like Chandler’s job on Friends – I know it’s business and probably accounting, but have no idea what’s involved in it!

It cracked me up and so I wrote her a "quick" little summary while I ate my lunch. I figured that some of the rest of you might not know exactly what I do (or care and if you don't, stop reading here), so here is my response to her. I don't know how much everyone knows about accounting but I sort of assumed most of you never took a class...

My job is basically to fix people’s accounting, train them, design and implement standardization, and to review reconciliations for all their balance sheet accounts. Not sure how much you know about accounting and am sure you never took a class, but all the accounts on the balance sheet are much like your checkbook…you have the bank who says you have $100 and you who says you have $400, there are known reasons why the differences occur (maybe you put a deposit in the day before the bank statement and wrote it down in your checkbook that day but it get credited to the bank the next day, maybe someone sent you money (wish this would happen to me) and you didn’t know about it so you didn’t write it down). Each month you should balance your check book. Well, with companies they have the same issues only (other than their cash accounts) there is not a bank involved but reports from different systems. For instance, with our crappy system, the place where we keep all the detail of what our customers owe us and what they have paid doesn’t talk to the system where our accounting is. Things should agree but sometimes if someone forgets to do something on either side or if there is timing like the example above then the amounts don’t match and you have to “balance” them. This should be done every month but some people don’t do it every month so it would be like you being off in your checking account by $1K but the last time your balance agreed to the bank was over a year ago. You have to go back to a year ago and then tie everything the bank has to what you have and see where the differences are. Simple example but you get the point.

There are 85 US locations with 50-60 balance sheet accounts a piece!

It gets further complicated by the fact that we finance cars for dealers (these accounts are 90% of our problem accounts). So, a dealer establishes a line of credit with us at a certain auction..their home auction. Then they can buy a car at one auction and then sell it at another (so money has to go between the two auctions when it sells because it has to go back to the home auction).
They can buy a car from an auction we don’t own and add it to their line (so we have to add it to their line and then send the check to the auction we don’t own)
They can buy it and sell it at the same auction
They can buy it at one auction and sell it outside the auction process to average joe (so we have it on their line and then have to get a check from them)
And about 19 other scenarios that you can think of. In addition to that, they have to manually post all this stuff to the general ledger (where the accounting is, sorry if you knew that)….if ANY of these steps get missed it causes the accounting to be out of whack and it takes FOREVER to find it…you literally have to almost do it car by car…what was added, what was paid off, what was transferred, what was booked to the gl, what wasn’t, if you do it every month then the most detail you have to go through is a month, but if you wait……..I went to New Orleans for an entire week and couldn’t even balance one month! Turns out they had plugged a number the month before…

My group reviews these reconciliations (balancing) that they do once a quarter to look for stuff that seems out of whack. Most items should be like the example I gave above where it was all something that happened in the same month, so if am looking at the December rec and see something on there from February it means they got lazy and are not trying to resolve the problem. Supposedly this was done by all the region people for there region (we have 6) for years and years but really half the regions never even turned in recs so they obviously were not being reviewed. Also, there is a standard way to do this (varies by company) so that they all look the same and odd items stick out…some people have created their own spreadsheets that make no sense and have the logic of a 2 yr old, so another thing we are doing is we revised all the standard recs so that we can have one big push to do it the same way. It will help us and help them when a new controller comes along and we don’t have to figure out it was being done in order to train them….we can just hand them a welcome pack and walk through it.

If they don’t reconcile every month then they will not know whether everything that was supposed to get booked actually did or if stuff got booked that wasn’t supposed to and this could cause our balance sheet to be wrong, which in turn can cause the income statement to be wrong, which could affect lots of things…

For the training part, once we fix a rec we train the people on how to properly do it themselves every month….or if they are doing it ass backwards we teach them how to do it right.

If you made it through all of that then Congrats!