Moving news...

Yesterday I meant to talk to my boss about when I was going to be in Atlanta and she turned around and asked the VP and it looks like it will be the third week of every month. I think that really only have to be here for 2-3 days but I will probably work the whole week here the months that I have sessions...there is plenty that I can do here. So, you can mark you calendars for that third week if you have any interest in getting together. I will probably stay some weekends when I do the photography thing and then other times I will go back to Dayton for the weekend. It is nice to have the flexibility and to know that I will definitely still be coming back here. I just want to be really careful about not using Atlanta as my comfort zone....and my crutch.

In other news, I think that I am going to get a kitty this weekend. I know that some of you hate cats (Molly) but Craig has a really sweet kitty and I want one too. Here is a picture of the one that we have an appt to go see and meet tomorrow. If she likes us and we like her then we are going to get her and Craig will keep her until I move :-)

Also just another little note, and this remind me of something Rebecca would be way better at writing about..... So, my business license for the city of Atlanta has to be renewed as it does every year. Anyone who does business in the city of Atlanta has to have this license and it is due to be renewed by Feb 15th or there is a $500 penalty. Obviously I put this off until the last minute but when I was filling it out it said that you needed to include the prior year's GA tax return. Ok, which prior year? The renewal says that it is a renewal for 2009 so to me the prior year would be 2008 but I don't have that one done yet (and I can't get it done because I still haven't received something I need from my rental property) so then maybe prior year means 2007? On the renewal you h ave to fill in the amount of gross receipts for the prior year...I was thinking 2008 so I filled that in, but then is that what the mean? Also, it asks for the GA return but nowhere on the GA return does it break out business income...it just takes the AGI number from the federal, which is a lump sum, to put on the GA return so no matter what return I give them, it is not going to break out my business income. So, I reseach online but that is no help so I decide to call the office. Of course I couldn't call yesterday because they close at 5 and I didn't even get back to my desk until 5:15 from meetings, so I called this morning. As I type this, I have been on hold now for 2 hrs and 26 mins. So, the girls in the office and I have a bet going on how long it will take before someone picks up. I wrote them a letter explaining my situation and will just include that I guess. Who has time to be on the phone this long? I just put it on speaker phone and have gone about my business, but still....ridiculous!!!

Mexican and Soccer

SoI have been craving Mexican like it was my job for a week! I emailed Dudley on Monday adn asked if she wanted to get some Mexican after the gym yesterday and she said yes, but then yesterday she cancelled on my for school work...understandable but that didn't give me my fix. I decided that I would just go and get take out. I get there to order and I place my order of two beef tacos and cheese dip. The guy asks me if I just called in an order and I said no. He said "are you sure because we just got an order just like that" hmmm, nope dude, pretty sure I would remember and it is not like there are 100s of things you can get at a Mexican restuarant, I mean, meat, cheese, tortilla, that is about it...just different combinations of those and with some rice and beans. He looked at me like I was lying, so I said " I promise, I live alone and I don't even know the phone number" then I noticed that he kept looking up at the TV all distracted so I looked to see what was on...soccer game. I asked if it was the World Cup qualifier (I am sure he was suprised I knew that) and he said yes. Apparently that was enough to put my order in. How did I know it was the World Cup qualifier? Well, because it was in Ohio and Craig was at the game with a bunch of his soccer friends. He wanted me to watch the game and "look for him" I think that he was kidding about looking for him cause I always say that when I tell him to watch Georgia games, but it still reminded me of something that Zachary would do :-) He called me when he got home and he had DVRd the game (which I would make fun of but I do that sometimes when I go to UGA games) and he was watching it again (I don't usually do that) while eating dinner...all of a sudden he said "i saw me" I didn't believe him but then he launched into this explanation of how he was in what would be the endzone in football (not sure what they call it in soccer) and when the guy scored the goal he was able to easily pick out some of the girls he was with because of what they had on. I am sure he is going to save it and show it to me this weekend so I will let you know if you can actually see him or not.

Also, just a little note...my tacos and cheese dip came out in about the time I had to type a sentence on my bb, so the next time we are eating Mexican and the food is slow...it is not my fault!! And, eating a soggy (by the time I got home from Smyrna) taco and some hardened cheese dip in my living room is just not the same as a patio with friends :-( So, the craving is still around. Carrie had mentioned to me maybe getting the girls together before I leave. I don't have any weekends left but if anyone can go Feb 26th and wants Mexican, I think that it would be the perfect night before my trip to Greece :-)

Taxes Suck

UGH! So, now that I am moving to Ohio I have to switch all my withholdings...and Ohio is one of the most taxed states in the country....federal, state, county, and local...what the heck??? THEN, because I lived here for part of the year I still have to file a GA return and THEN I have to keep track of all the days that I am back in GA so that I can allocate my time between the two states at the end of the year...gross! Add that to the business accounting, 2 rental properties and my condo and it takes me quite a while to figure it all out. UGH! I think that I am definitely going to have to be more organized next year. At least I think that I am getting a refund this year...once I figure it all out.

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!

Being a girl...

Since mostly girls read this, I figure I can post about this...and no, it has nothing to do with my period or PMS....so if a boy is reading, relax.

I just feel a little emotional lately (and not due to above reasons) and I don't know what it is but the last two days I have been bad about that. I mean yesterday I let that client get to me even though I really don't care and knew when I sent the email that some of them would react that way and then today I got mad at my allergy doctor. Then I get annoyed that I get upset and then....well, you see the pattern....

Ok, so I go to the allergy doctor (which I haven't been to in 3 years according to them but I know that is not right). I have asthma and I am really allergic to dust and dogs and some kitties. So, when I started dating Craig, I needed medicine to help with all of that since his dog weighed as much as I do and he had a cat. Since I don't use the medicine every day, it expires or runs out...I mean it has probably legitimately been 2 years since I went there and I had a prescription for a year and it is two years later, I have to go back to him to get a refill before I move. I also wanted to ask him about the fact that I had a huge problem with my asthma back in December when I switched to Yaz....and he didn't even listen to me. He said it might have been xmas popourri or the xmas tree. Um, I don't have any popourri and I have had a xmas tree every year since I was born and the same type of tree, so he says maybe it was the popourri in the stores...I should have told him that Craig and I laid around for 5 days straight so that wasn't it either, but it didn't seem worth it....so, the fact that my asthma has been fine for 12 years with the exception of what I am allergic to and the fact that the only thing I changed was this pill, doesn't lead you to the conclusion that they might be related? Interesing....His advice...just keeping taking the pill (though i had already switched back to my old one because I couldn't breathe for a week). I am not saying that it couldn't have been a coincidence but didn't even entertain the idea...popourri?? I guess I will try the pill one more time (I had asked Erin about it and she had the same advice and I trust her way more anyway) I might as well just pay him to write me a prescription. When I told Craig the story he asked if the doctor was older and said that he probably came from a time when women couldn't talk about what bothered them and they just had to suck it up...that made me laugh...needless to say, I am not going back to him. I will find a nicer doctor in Ohio to give me my meds...too bad I can't just get Erin to do it :-) Craig's cat doesn't really bother me so I am hoping that after I am there for a while I will get used to him (and the cat I want to get) and will not have any need for any medicine other than when I am around other people's pets....when do I grow out of that? Allergies suck!

So, as you see, neither of these incidents was a big deal AT ALL, yet they both got me worked up....

I will just have to keep telling myself...17 days until Greece :-)

Mixed Feelings

I have mixed feelings about today. On the work end things seemed to go really well today. I had a meeting this morning with the CFO....I think I wrote about it (guess I could go back and read but I am too lazy). It was the one where I replied no to the staff meeting cause I was going to be out of town and he offered to meet with me one on one...and considering how the second half of the day went, it was probably a good idea that I met with him in case this photography thing doesn't pan out and in case I want to move up in the company. I thought he just did it to be nice but then it got moved a couple times and he stuck with it and today was the day. Last week he also stopped by my office (on his way to someone else's office) and said he wanted to talk to me about a huge project we have been working on. So, today I told him about the project and how I felt the locations were doing. He sort of put me on the spot and asked for the 5 worst locations. I felt bad but then again, him getting involved will help me enforce my stuff! He also decided that he wanted the quarterly report that I issue so that is getting more notice now too. THEN, he went to his weekly staff meeting and brought up (in front of my boss) how I was the only one who responded no to the staff meeting and then set up a meeting with him. He also said he was pleased with what my group was doing and with what he heard from me and said we need some clean up (my job!!). That part was good. I was dumb and posted that I was having a good day on FB and then the photography stuff started to not go so well :-( I had a client be pretty rude to me (on private blog) and then another clien who didn't like her pics (private blog). It was a little deflating :-(

Now I am trying to get together how I will move my photography to Ohio....it is quite a challenge and Craig is no help cause he doesn't know anyone with kids really. Well, one girl so hopefully I will get to do hers.

Here is some of the competition...I need to update my website!! Looking at these sites sort of makes me wonder whether I will be able to even do photography there......
http://heartandlightphotography.com/
http://www.nicolekessel.com/index2.php
http://susiesincock.typepad.com/catchlight_news/
http://snapshotsbybridget.blogspot.com/
http://sara-annephotography.com/index2.php?v=v1

Private Blog

For those that read my private blog (or if you want access, email me or tell me on FB), I posted something over there today that I need help with related to my photog biz....should have known that posting "Melissa has had a good Monday" on FB was not a good idea.