Need an attitude adjustment or a sanity check

In My Humble Opinion
1

I need some kind strangers to either give me an honest smackdown or sanity check that my inclinations are correct on some things. I know I can depend on you SD folks to deliver. :stuck_out_tongue:

TL;DR Need to know if I’m heading too far in the direction of being a beaurocrat or if my desires for some enforced procedure are sane.

I’m having this issue in two important areas of my life: my volunteer work and my paid job. So yeah, I need to get a handle on it asap. I’m a business analyst, trained and background in software engineering, so I have a very precise logical mind. I am always compelled, without necessarily intending to, to streamline processes that are illogical or wasteful. At the same time it drives me nuts when things are disorganized and when I see that I want to implement a logical process to make things easier to do correctly the first time.

At work, we are reorganizing some processes and some of our upper management has their own thoughts about how things should be. For example, we have a process where customers request some data to be entered in our system on their behalf. They submit a request to customer service, CS verifies that the new data is not already in the system and enters it, CS then notifies the marketing team who updates an official published list, marketing then sends the list with a cover letter to the communications team for publication. I’ve been told that CS can’t be trusted to “own” the process despite them being trusted enough to enter the data, so this is why they can’t just update the published list and send it with the cover letter to communications. A powerful director feels that marketing “owns” the process despite us not being allowed access to enter the data into the system. I really think it’s silly and that either CS should own the process and leave marketing out of it, or marketing should be allowed to enter the data and leave CS out of it. It’s too many moving parts, too many opportunities for error.

(Where do I fit in with that such that it grinds my gears? I’m in the marketing team and have been tasked with updating the official list and cover letter and sending it to the communication team. Despite the fact that I otherwise have nothing to do with the product that the data is used for, no vested interest in whether the data is correct, no industry expertise to be able to validate the data, and so far I’ve been making a lot of mistakes. I haven’t been sorting the list correctly, the list is not uppercased/lowercased/mixedcased correctly, I don’t highlight new/changed data correctly, I don’t word the cover letter correctly, etc. All of these little rules I’ve been finding by doing it wrong and being corrected, one by one. I don’t want out of it just because I’m screwing it up but also because there’s really no good reason for me to be involved. As a process owner, I don’t give a shit, so why do I own it?)

Okay, the other side is my volunteer work. I sit a board seat on a small animal rescue nonprofit. We have some procedures, like adoption application reviews and approvals that sometimes get skipped. I find out after the fact, like on Facebook that we placed a dog with a family, and there was no application or review or board approval. It was someone a board member knew so they just gave them the dog. I want to talk to the board and remind them about the importance of following our adoption process but I’m afraid to sound like a beaurocrat. Also, while I’m treasurer, the founder likes to do most of the banking and creating invoices. She means well but she’s disorganized and scattershot so I’ve been getting payments before invoices are created, and I’m always having to ping her for what checks she wrote (because our stupid bank doesn’t say on the monthly statement who the check was written to; it says retarded computer stuff like “share draft” with a long number after that). I want to propose to her that she leave all the banking to me, but I worry that it will sound controlling, like I’m trying to take over. But really, if she was organized and methodical there wouldn’t be any problem. The treasury work really feeds my compulsion to be obsessively correct, but I don’t want to be abrasive. Thoughts?

2

My first thought is that you sound very intelligent and well spoken, but life in these environments might be difficult for you. You seem to want to rely on logic to a significantly greater extent then the average person. You also seem to be very focused on processes and rules and not as focused on people and their hierarchies and social rules.

I don’t think any of this is bad; I’m comfortable with fairly strict adherence to processes.; but unfortunately in my experience, people who follow the social rules always fair better in these situations than people who follow process and logic rules.

3

Unforutenly, the first part was a little to business mumbo jumbo for me to help you with, but I do have a possible solution for the second part as I’m in a similar situation.

At my work I do all the book keeping as well and the owner also writes (paper) checks or even just makes online payments without entering them into Quickbooks. That means when I get the statements I see things like “Check 2311 $147” or “ACH $23”.

I’d start by asking her if you can get access to the online bank account. That’ll make your life worlds easier (even just by phone). Then, at least, you can see what the checks are for. As long as you have the statement, you’re not really seeing anything that you don’t already know. With some banks, she can even set you up with your own ‘account’ with limited access so you can’t, say, transfer money, if she’s worried about that.
Of course, in my situation that still left me with the problem of what the hell the checks were for. Great, the ACH was a payment on his CITI card. I’ve explained to him the concept of Garbage In/Garbage out when it comes to accounting, but when I have to ask him 5 times over three days about a $23 check to close out last months books, eventually I just BS the entry to move on with my day. I have more important things to do than worry about that. (If it were several thousand dollars, I’d keep pestering him for a breakdown).

As for getting the payments before the invoices are made. I’m not sure that’s a big deal. I get those all the time as well. Boss says ‘here’s a $100 check from John’s deli for some stuff I brought to him last week, just make and invoice and add it to your next deposit’. As long as the amount is right, I don’t think it really matters if the invoice is created before or after the check is written. If she’s regularly getting the amounts wrong, that’s different.

Lastly, something I always keep in mind that my mom told me when I first started working and I’d come home complaining about what an unfair asshole the boss was being (the boss was/is my dad). “He’s the boss and you have to play by his rules, even if they’re unfair”. I know you have a board and the rules are a bit different than a store with a few employees, but it comes down to ‘suck it up, if she tosses you an adoption check, just write an invoice for that amount and move on, bigger fish and all that’.
I can get behind you on the banking though. Ask her for access to the online account.

If she won’t, reconcile the account until you’re 100% sure it’s only off by those missing checks, write them down on a piece of paper (amounts, dates, numbers) and ask her to look them up and give you the names. Shouldn’t take more than a minute or two. Then you can enter them.

4

Even if I didn’t understand the first part, that’s sort of what I got from it. Every time I’ve tried to implement something logical, I’ve always ended up with people saying ‘why, this works fine’. Even when I’m looking at them going ‘your way takes an hour, this’ll take like 20 minutes’.

It always reminds me of that Malcolm in the Middle episode where he started working at the LuckyAide and his first job was to crush boxes. He had to take the boxes down to the basement to the designated box flattening area, bring them back upstairs and put them in the cardboard compactor.
Since the compactor was right next to the pile of boxes he just flattened them right there and even though he saved a ton of time by not carrying them all to the basement first, he got in trouble for not following orders.

5

I am already on the account and have my own debit card for it and online access so I can get the statements. The problem is that the stupid bank statements are obscure. Line items are listed as I mentioned, with machine names like “share draft”. They also don’t include a scanned image of the checks even though other banks have been offering that for years.

Yeah, this is what I currently do. Just kind of tired of it and wondering if I should be firmer about ensuring correct record keeping.

It’s a big problem when I see income on Paypal or deposits on our bank statement so I record them as donations only to discover 1 - 6 months later that they were actually payments for an invoice that I didn’t know needed to be created. I guess the problem is that the communication is missing.

Well, yes and this applies to my paid job situation but not so much to the volunteer. Given that I sit a board seat, I think I’m one of the bosses so should have a say in things.

Yeah, this is what I currently do. Just wondering if I shouldn’t be trying to enforce some better fiscal discipline. You know? I sign my name on the IRS forms, after all. But it’s possible that I’m taking it too seriously.

6

Heh, yes this is exactly the kind of thing that grinds my gears. Enforcing social discipline to that extent works for kindergardeners who need to learn how to play nice and to respect authority. But in the adult working world, shouldn’t we be striving to work smarter rather than harder? I mean, wtf, right?

7

If you’re the treasurer, the founder needs to stop doing your job. By virtue of your title you will eventually take the heat for anything she does incorrectly.

In both of your problems it looks like too many cooks.

8

I’d be a squeaky wheel and start calling the bank each month with a list of items that “I just can’t seem to figure out” and let them sort it out. Ask them who these deposits came from or who the money was sent out to. I’ve even gone so far as to say “If you can’t tell me who this ‘share draft’ was sent to, I’d like it back”. Though, that time, it turned out a teller took it from my account because her till came up short that night and for some reason she didn’t think I’d notice $50 missing.

On my account I’ll see obscure things like that, but clicking on them I can see a scanned image which, more often than not, turns out to be an automatic payment to a credit card (that the boss made and didn’t record). Some credit cards, when you make an automatic payment, make a check and deposit that. So it comes up with bizarre check numbers that don’t look right. So what I see is CHK # 9996515582315/$132.00, but when I look at the scanned image is a picture of a check to CITI Bank (on a check that they made) and it makes sense. Obviously if your bank doesn’t do that, it doesn’t help. If you call them, they might be able to see it on their end.

So, either you make calling the bank part of your job, or you hand your boss a list of checks each month and ask her to figure it out and hope she gets around to it sometime in the next year and half. Personally, I’d just say do it yourself. One of the reasons I just started BSing some of those entries is because it’s faster. It drove me nuts because I’d have the boss asking why the bank or the accountant didn’t have the quarterly numbers yet, they were due two months ago!!!1! and I’d have to explain to him that I can’t reconcile June until I reconcile May and I can’t close May until he tells me what those two checks were for that I’ve asked him about like 13 times in the last two months.
Know what…fuck it, one of them was for gas and the other was for, um, had to buy some a new, screw it, it was for gas also. Moving on.
My life got a lot easier when I stopped nagging him (over these little charges) and started doing that.

Just to be clear, $20 in this department instead of that one doesn’t have any major consequences in the long run. It’s not like I’m putting a five thousand dollar charge in an account that’s tax deductible instead of one that’s not (or vice versa). I actually keep my books pretty tight, but there’s a fine balance between keeping them perfect and not tearing my hair out or having stroke because I’ve been working 37 hour days.

9

Okay, good feedback, thanks. For the treasurer thing, I think I’ll talk to her about the possibility of leaving invoices to me, and not worry about the bank statement stupidity. I can keep fudging things here and there like you suggest. My preference is to change to a bank that is more customer friendly, but I know it’s one she picked because it’s close to her paid job. She has a tendency to take checks to work with her, do the banking and then leave the checks on her desk somewhere (because when I’ve asked her what things were on weekends she always says to wait until Monday when she’s back in the office). Aside from that, I’ll try not to sweat it.

On the process improvement in my paid job, I think what I’ll do is just document these things. It’s something we’re working on anyway, so doing that won’t ruffle any feathers. It’s an environment full of really senior people who have all worked there for a decade or longer and have gotten into the habit of doing their work without documenting anything. I’ve been in their place at a previous company so I understand that when you’ve been doing something for years, it becomes second nature and you can’t imagine the need to document it. We had one such old-timer leave a few months ago who had fingers in every pie and left without telling anybody what tasks she was doing. So we’re scrambling to figure out what it all was and get it documented on top of our normal project work. (She now works for one of our customer agencies and sees our struggles doing some external communications wrong (tasks she used to do for us), and her snide little emails back to a few of my coworkers are just… charming.

10

I used to have a job with a medium sized company where the vast majority of my time was spend improving internal processes, often by vastly changing them. I worked with the CEO to identify priorities, then worked with the people who actually did the work, then implemented the changes.

Based on my experience, I’d suggest overpowering your natural instinct and leaving this alone. Nobody ever appreciates it, except senior management, and in your case you already know a senior director is opposed to you messing with the process.

In your particular case, I get the inefficiency of the current setup, but it doesn’t seem like you’ve made a great case for changing things. It sounds a little bit like you’ve been tasked with this because your department is supposed to actually care that it’s done right, but you don’t personally care so you’ve been doing a crappy job at it and making mistakes.

I’m not saying that’s the case. It’s just comes off that way to someone who doesn’t really care much about it, which will be all the people you’d have to convince to change things.

You’re completely right about this one. Good luck actually solving the situation, but you’re right.

11

Actually all the teams involved have been having meetings to try to understand this process, get it documented and maybe streamline it if it makes sense. We’re getting some contradictory push from senior management: one in favor, one opposed. I’m leaving that up to my manager to deal with. But it makes an already challenging situation pretty chaotic. We also seem to be “tied up in committee” in that some people have agreed that my points have merit but they still get set aside because there’s just too much going on. We’ve met three times so far and still haven’t managed to review the draft process flow that someone else came up with!

I’m sorry I gave that impression. I was trying not to write a three-volume encyclopedic set of explanation, and the result probably made me look flippant. I do care about doing a quality job and doing things RIGHT, which is the root of my angst in this whole thing. I’ve been making mistakes because the lady who used to do this task (only mentioned in my last post) never documented what seemed obvious to her but now we are discovering that nobody else in the company knew she was doing these things. She’s “helping” us discover them by sending snotty little emails to various people (comments like having to babysit, etc.)

This morning I pulled all of those things we’ve identified to date into one document and am reviewing it with the team. At least that way if I’m still saddled with the task, I can do it correctly and by rote. I’m very aware of what it’s like when people start making snarky private jokes to each other like “you had ONE job…” when the things you screw up are little like sorting a list correctly. I don’t want to be the target of such gossip.

12

I do feel your pain on both of these but…

For the first example: if this is the way things are right now, even if it is inefficient, you need to give a shit. Look at an exisiting list and see that it is sorted a certain way, with Proper syntax, etc. Meet with the woman who was doing it and go through the list of things she did. It’s not your fault if you weren’t fully trained, but until you can change the process, act as if you care.

On the second one, even if the boss is scatterbrained, it’s an internal control that one person not be in charge of everything money-related. Who reviews your work? As far as invoices written after payment – heck, we have POs written after invoices come in. Just put the payment to a clearing account until you have more info, so at least your cash is correct.

13

If you are the treasurer, you need to make sure that you are in control of accounts. Period. This is the only way to protect yourself from any accusations of fraud or embezzlement, should there be a problem. There should be a cosigner for checks that are written on the account, but the owner should NOT be handling any of the banking. If she insists on handling it, then you should remove yourself from the position.

14

If you wait long enough, though, sometimes people come around. Where I work TPTB were extremely resistant to standardizing how we do things across contracts in different states, saying we need “to be flexible” every time my boss and I suggested anything that would make processes uniform.

But now that we’ve doubled in size and income over the past 18 months, the song TPTB is singing now is more along the lines of “holy shit, we’re too big to implement things six different ways and need to have a lot more across the board standards.” Yay.

15

Approx 25 years in software design and development.

First - yes, some powerful people have strong ideas as to who owns what.

This brings up the immediate Q:

Who the f*** asked you what you think, and why should they care what you think?

Unless you have been tasked with redesigning the process, proceed carefully - if a VP decides you are trying to take a chunk of his/her fiefdom, you may be in deep doo-doo real quick.

My mantra was “It all pays the same”. You want me to sit and listen to a bullshit “Status Report”? Fine. Just make sure the check doesn’t bounce.

The animal rescue - yes, you are micro-managing if you demand trivial processes are followed just to have them followed.
If the critter gets a good home, what matters if this form was or was not completed?

Unless there is a chance of liability arising over informal adoptions, back off.

The money? This is not a public-traded corporation. Relax and keep the overall purpose of the group in mind and don’t fret the details.

16

Remember the old saw about “Give me the power to change, the ability to accept the unchangeable, and the wisdom to know the difference.”? Right now IMO you’re acting short on wisdom. So here, I offer you a hunk from my battle-scarred hide:

Expecting anything but headaches from being treasurer of a non-profit is somewhere between silly and batshit insane. If you’re not comfortable with how they actually do things, resign. Period. There is no alternative solution. You are not going to change them or their little pitiful (lack of) organization by one iota. All you will do is make enemies, ulcers, and potential financial liability for yourself. Run away, run away!!!

Others have commented on the work situation. It sounds to me like a truly clueless company run by dysfunctional random socialization rather than deliberate well-designed policy. If that’s fact, and not just your understandably frustrated hyperbole, it’s also time to start looking for other work. Or it’s time to take usedtobe’s sage advice: show up, cash paychecks, and care not a bit about anything other than blending invisibly into the background. While still looking for a job at a better company.

17

That was pretty much my point. Nobody is ever going to care about the three-volume encyclopedic explanation. What comes through is that you keep screwing up simple things like sorting and capitalization and you want somebody else to have to do it. Then there’s a reason, but you get into encyclopedic territory and blah blah blah.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting you shouldn’t post about it on the Internet. By all means go wild. It’s just as a manager, I hear you talking about process ownership when you can’t even get the simple details right. Why does this prior woman have to document her process? Just look up the last time she did it and match the sort and capitalization / other format issues to her version.

I don’t mean to be harsh… but honestly that’s my reaction.

18

Here’s what I’d say, based on my years of experience designing & implementing software systems prior to retirement (and years of being Treasurer for a non-profit org since then):

The work situation is a classic example of the perils of having the same data stored in two places – trying to keep them in sync, change simultaneously, etc. I’m sure the CS people involved are just as annoyed with the situation as you are. An ideal situation would be a process where the officially published list from Marketing is automatically downloaded from the system that CS maintains. Then when they have completed the data updates, they notify you in Marketing, you download the data, ‘prettify’ it for the published format, and send it on for publication. Should be feasible to have a system semi-automated enough that if CS gets the updates done by noon, you cam have the new official list published to all customers by 5pm. When the turnaround is that quick, everyone should like the new process (and will try to take credit for it, but that’s another problem).

Regarding the volunteer Treasurer position, does the organization have an accountant that does the annual 990 tax return? If so, get him to help you with this. They will clearly see this as an ‘issue’ from an accounting & fiscal reporting standpoint. Talk to them about this, and they can put something about this in a Note to the Annual Financial Statement or accompanying Auditors Recommendations’. If it’s worded something like “Founder spends too much time on mundane financial matters like writing checks when she should be concentrating on strategic direction of the organization; we recommend that she be relieved of this by havind ALL such work done only by the Treasurer”.

Also, how can she actually write a check?
I have a President and 2 Vice Presidents who have signing authority on the accounts, but I have physical possession of all our blank check forms. So if I was hit by a truck, they could get access to the bank accounts easily. But they can not easily write out a check, because I have the checkbook.
So get physical possession of that checkbook, and keep it locked away from her. (Note that this means you will have to be very responsive at times – when she calls and says X needs to be paid right away, you have to say I’ll get the check in the mail tonight, and do it.)

19

I see what you’re saying, and you’re right. It should have been simple enough that I could see her last published list and just emulate her style. At the risk of sounding like I’m making excuses, it wasn’t that simple. Despite her snarky comments, the list when she left it didn’t have a consistent style, either. Things were all mixed-case and with inconsistent spacing. I am also a little comforted that all the other people who have visibility on the process have also commented that they didn’t know (each of the things she brought up as mistakes). I have pulled it all into one document now that we’re reviewing, so I shouldn’t make any mistakes going forward.

20

Great point and I would love it if we could do that! Sadly, it would take some development to the system to enable such a download. (Yeah, I know, but… well, you probably know, too.)

No, as treasurer, I serve as the accountant and do the 990 forms each year.

She writes checks (and charges stuff on her ATM card) because she has the checkbook and an ATM card. We are really small, when she founded the organization, she opened a bank account at her preferred credit union. A few years later, I came along and became treasurer. So she’s still doing the work she used to, although she’s not organized enough (or interested enough, I think) to actually do the QuickBooks bookkeeping so turned all of that over to me. She still logs into QB to create invoices, though, and occasionally records payments against the invoices.