Financial Reporting
November 9th 2009 07:26
He's not working in our office, so it's required quite a bit of time to bring him up to speed as to what we do, how it's categorised and how we want to report at the end of it all. He only comes in for about an hour or so once a week, roughly, so it's taken a bit of time (although an hour is all I can manage at a time in terms of thinking about the topic!) And in the middle of the period all the staff in our office were up in the North Island for a wedding of another colleague - and this took out another chunk of time.
He's a person who looks at what's wanted first, whereas I'm keen to get onto the how as quickly as possible. This difference in approach required a bit of getting over - on my part. I like complex tasks dealt with as soon as possible. Complex tasks don't like to be dealt with that way.
At present I'm trying to figure out codes for the various areas in such a way that they're not totally impossible to enter as data, but they're not going to be useless when it comes to reporting either. He's managed to cull down my original idea of having two lots of codes for the same items (so we could report to two different groups separately); he likes to keep things as simple as possible, and keeps reminding me that computers are simple beings when all's said and done.
It isn't essential that we have extensive, detailed reporting; rather knowing that we can report in that way is a kind of cheap insurance for the day when someone decides that they'd really, really like to know details, the sort we can't easily provide at the moment.
Our next step is to see if there's any ready-to-go software that we can use rather than having to build something from scratch. I already have Mind Your Own Business on my home computer, so I'm familiar with that, and I've used a programme called Prophet (at my old shop). We're also going to look at the programme the church uses: Quicken. So there are some options, but whether they'll be adaptable enough for the task is something we've yet to discover!
Photo of my corner of the office - I mean, literally: that desk in the corner is where I hang out...
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