No Rest for the Weary

I went back to work today. It's like chaos incarnate in that building. Ok, maybe just the financial part of the building. Quite the welcome back for this little missy. "Hit the ground running" would be an understatement.

Unbeknownst to me (and about 90% of the other employees), our company was sold. That sale is finalized TOMORROW. Yeah, tomorrow. If you have even a smattering of an idea of what goes into a business sale, you realize the enormity of this situation.

From a financial perspective, this event is treated like the "end of fiscal year." To give you an idea of the importance and stress involved with that event, let's compare it to the "end of fiscal month" that comes around on the last Friday of every month.

It's like the end of the world.

And I'm not even joking.

Basically, millions and millions of dollars have to be analyzed, balanced, unapplied, overapplied, reapplied, adjusted, and tweaked into perfection. They should thank their lucky stars that, in spite of the fact that one fourth of their accounts receivable department (read: me) has never taken any accounting classes, she happens to already be adept at math and (solely by the grace of God) a fast learner.

So this is always a stressful event. In this particular case, we have a few added elements to add even more adventure to the scenario.

1) It's busy season. We are processing thousands of payments a day, with hundreds upon hundreds of those requiring manual entry. EVERY DAY.

2) Tomorrow is Tuesday. The amount of payments processed on Tuesday is double (on average) what is processed any other day. It usually has to be carried over to Wednesday. This is not an option tomorrow, since we have to "close out" at 4 pm. We had to start Tuesday's batch today, which isn't easy when you don't have customer or account numbers: all we have are scans of the checks until the real data arrives in the mail tomorrow. What this means (for those of you who don't know anything about accounts receivable) is that we have to search for each and every customer or account in our slow-as-a-snail, horribly antiquated, out-dated database. My average rate for posting payments is between 60 and 100 checks an hour. When we have to do it the hard way, I get (at most) 30 done an hour.

3) The Credit and Collections manager - my boss - is gone all week. He is the one sane person in management. And probably one of a dozen (and that's a generous estimate) sane people in the building.

Fun stuff, eh? ;)