For those of you who have been in charge of allocating a department’s budget and the like, what’s the most money that didn’t belong to you but you were responsible for spending/managing? I thought about making this a poll but I don’t even really have a clue of what appropriate values would be for options.
I didn’t have to allocate a budget or anything, but I was responsible for receiving, keeping and re-shipping three corporate checks that added up to a million and a half.
I manage anywhere from $5-$15 MM a year depending on the projects we’re working on.
But it’s not like I could write a check for a new boat, there are very secure safeties in place.
My department’s budget is about a million a year, and I have pretty much sole discretion about how it is spent.
On a few rare occasions, I’ve been asked to deliver small airplanes cross-country to their new owners. Usually this involves fetching the craft after the deal is done, and I have no involvement with the finance part of the deal. In one unusual case the owner-to-be assigned me power of attorney, with limited authority to evaluate, test-fly and negotiate (significant changes required his phone approval, tho’). I spent 2 days evaluating and testing his new machine and on the third day signed a check for a little over $250,000. I departed soon after and delivered it to its new home. This was the largest check I’ve ever written, and the largest amount of money I’ve ever been solely responsible for.
This.
It’s not really as much fun as I imagined to spend other peoples money - too much paperwork.
The single most expensive piece of gear I’ve been responsible for retails for about $160 million.
I needed to make darn sure I didn’t break it; reimbursing the company would have been a bitch. 
Considering the rest of the liability tail connected to a major screw up, there’s probably close to a half a billion dollars at risk every day I went to work.
I am currently responsible for about $750 million. I expect it will hit a billion at some point in the next year or so. I am a financial planner so I don’t spend it, but I am responsible for it’s allocation. It still kind of boggles my mind to have that kind of responsibility.
I was a buyer at a manufacturing plant and wrote a purchase order for 200K worth of steel once.
I was Treasurer of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer of America, so that was a few hundred thousand dollars. I once had to deposit a $38,000 check for them.
One time I had to fill out an expense report for, like, two weeks worth of hotel lunches.
I never sat down and added it (and my last job was really disorangized), but I was in the buying department. I would say I was personally in charge of spending about five million a year. With the whole department (based on my experience and assuming others had the same budget) being in charge of about 40 million. While I was never tempted to steal anything, it would have been too much of a hassel. We get called regularly from banks asking if I really spent a half million dollars on a certain product. Or asking we really wanted 10,000 of certain product. I guess they were covering their asses, but it was really annoying. Especially if it was with person with did business with regularly.
When I worked as a concert PA I would often be given up to a couple thousand dollars to buy whatever. It doesn’t sound like much, but mind you it was cash. Even after having done it a while it was still always strange to just be handed a stack of $100 bills and sent on my way.
Yes, but if you screw up very badly, you are not going to be around to care, right?
Professionally, the largest cheque I’ve had to deliver to the other side after a settlement was around $8 million. I was a bit freaked out at first, and thought about couriering it, but instead I just thought, "If this were a cheque for a thousand bucks, I’d just put i in my pocket and walk it down the street to the other lawyers. So that’s what I did.
Each year for two years I had to work out how to spend £450,000 of taxpayer’s money.
For very loose values of “be responsible for,” I’d say $5 billion–I’ve worked on several deals of that magnitude.
In the sense of “having responsibility over spending it,” probably about $2,000 or so (as part of my role in a student organization in college).
Over the course of a year I collect, balance, and distribute ~$14.3 million (property taxes).
The biggest single check I wrote was for nearly $3 million last year for a week’s worth of school district taxes. I could barely fit the written-out amount on the line.
It’s odd because after my first year I became sort of blase about huge amounts of money. Sometimes I’ll add up a deposit and actually think, “whaddyamean it’s only $100,000?”
I manage department budgets at my Fortune 50 company. Currently I manage ~$6MM, but I’ve managed budgets up to $25MM.
FYI, I also used to manage my daughter’s pre-school budget. It was about $20,000 total. Honestly, that budget was just more work because I was a one-stop shop – I set it all up in QuickBooks, approved expenditures, wrote checks, balanced the accounts, dealt with the IRS, advised the board, and ran all the reports. Now I just run the reports, do an occasional audit of line item entries, and approve expenditures.
I’ve worked a lot in advertising as a media buyer. I decided how millions of dollars of our clients money would be spent on local tv and radio stations.