Friday, March 16, 2007

Accountants are detail people, right?

So I spent about an hour yesterday and the past 1.5 hours looking for a variance that popped out in a reconciliation that I prepare each month. (Those of you who don't like or don't get "numbers people" may just want to stop reading right now).

Every month, I have to compare two sets of data to ensure that they equal. Even for those of you who do like numbers... the explanation is more than you would care to read - trust me. So I began preparing the reconciliation yesterday afternoon by gathering the appropriate numbers... dropping them into my nifty spreadsheet... and I was left with a variance of $232,640. Now for an oil company in this day, that is not a lot of money; but it still needs to be addressed... I mean we aren't ExxonMobil.

So like I said, I spent 2.5 hours looking at this... there was no reason that the variance should be there. It just didn't make sense at all. Well hold and below... I had simply left an entire number out of the calculation. Any guesses on what the number was?

Yeah. I know... I take almost a month off from blogging and this is my comeback? My appologies. I just felt like such an idiot that I felt the need to share it with anyone who would listen.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

wow, they really don't pay you enough.

Alyssa said...

Hey, we all have idiot moments. There have been times when I give permission to a student to go to the restroom. When they walk back in the door, I snap, "Did I give you permission to leave?" They look at me with a mixture of fear and "Here's your sign!" Doh!

Anonymous said...

My guess is that the number left out of the calc was your salary, right? I should have gone to the oil biz; there's no money in research. ;-)
brian p
ps we need to do lunch.