On the day I joined I was given three things; A key fob to get in the front door that was never locked, a cup that had some unidentified gloop sitting in the bottom and control of the expenses process. The latter was handed over with a derisive snort from Sharon, the team supervisor. I found out later that the snort was her signature expression when she was handing over a job that she didn’t want to do, that the person getting it would hate and that was virtually impossible.
Making expenses policy on the greens
I used the key fob to put under my desk leg so that it wouldn’t wobble, brought my own cup into the office and then set about exploring the murky world of expenses in XYZ Plastics. The first thing I discovered was that expenses policy was largely decided on the golf course. If you played with the chairman then you were virtually guaranteed that whatever you put through that month was going to be approved. If you played with the chairman and beat him then you were guaranteed that your expenses would be rejected for the next six months.
This meant that we had to decide whether to pay an expense claim based on the golfing prowess and diplomatic skills of the staff member.
Until the auditors arrived. Once they read the riot act to the board, the finance team was tasked with producing a new expenses policy. Sharon handed the job over to me with another snort.
Using random food to answer questions
The first thing I realised was that handing the expense claims included paper – a lot of paper. In fact, I worked out once that we got through 1/18th of the trees in the New Forest every year. Of course, as anyone who has been there knows, the New Forest isn’t very new and has fewer trees than you would expect from a forest. Trading standards have been brought up-to-date on this matter.
As there was no standard form, every department had produced their own and it arrived, sometimes with receipts attached, often with nothing but a coffee stain and they sat at the end of my desk festering. It seemed to me that small elves were sitting under the printer, waiting until I had gone home to slap more claims onto the increasing pile at the end of my desk.
On a particularly bad day, the FD made the mistake of asking me what my ‘SLA’ was and I told him it was tuna. He’s not the most confident chap so I realised early on that if you give him a completely random answer he can’t find it within himself to challenge you. That’s why I use arbitrary foods as a response to difficult questions. Spaghetti got me a pay rise once.
I tried to convene a meeting of all the department heads to decide on a standard paper form that they would all use, at which point I realised that none of them liked each other enough to stay in the same room for more than five minutes so I designed my own and enforced it like some tinpot dictator.
Let me tell you, dictatorship feels good.
Once people were using the same form things sped up a bit and so I started laying down some more ground rules.
Expenses forms had to be added up, they had to be signed, they had to be submitted by the last Thursday of each month.
Then I revised my rules.
Expenses forms had to be added up CORRECTLY, they had to be signed BY YOUR MANAGER, they had to be submitted TO ME by the last Thursday of each month.
It was like trying to herd cats. Slowly things started to take shape and the pile on the end of my desk began to reduce. The FD came to me and said he was pleased to see that the pile had reduced, did I think that I could take on some more tasks?
‘Marzipan’ I said.
We replace snoozy Keith and my worst fear is confirmed.
Finally, people were playing ball. Expenses were turning up with receipts attached, they were on the right form, they were signed off by their manager and for the most part, they were added up correctly. OK so it took me an age to work out if the expenses were within policy, to work out the VAT, to input them into the general ledger and to input them again into the bank payments system but it was all going well. Until the FD appeared one day and said he needed a report on all of the expenses paid to the directors for the statutory accounts and this time he wasn’t going to take marmalade for an answer!
Unreasonable.
As the workload increased so Sharon decided to leave and as I had done such an amazing job on the expenses the FD decided to promote me to accounts supervisor. Which was nice. Of course, by now there was only two of us left in the department, me and Megan and she smelled of horses.
The FD kindly authorised two replacements for Sharon and Snoozy Keith and we took on a couple of juniors. When Martin started on his first day, I decided that this was my chance to get rid of the expenses job forever so I handed it over together with a key fob to get in the front door that was never locked and a cup from the cupboard that had some unidentified gloop in the bottom. Then I snorted. That’s when I realised I’d turned into Sharon.
I learn to play golf badly
Over time I’d started to get the finance team into shape and came to the notice of the chairman. He invited me to play in a four-ball with some of the senior salespeople and I agreed. After all, that’s what I had been taking lessons for all these months.
Amazingly he beat me easily which as my golf coach later told me was due to me ‘accidentally’ closing my eyes on every tee shot.
It was on one of these frequent outings that he asked me if it was worth investing in some proper expenses software so that we could finally ditch all of the manual processes.
What was my answer?
Well it wasn’t “cup-a-soup”.
Don’t let manual expenses get the better of you
If some of this sounds a little familiar then maybe it’s time for you to look at some proper expenses software.
Automating your expenses can get rid of all that paper, make sure everything is in policy and even link up with your bank and general ledger so you can say goodbye to double keying information.
Access Expense is specifically designed to take the drudgery away so don’t turn into Sharon, click on the link and set up your own free demonstration.