I do solemly swear...

To post more once this statistics class and FYE are over. I have the month of November slotted for many catch up projects like blogging, house cleaning, putting pic CD's together of the wedding, painting, and so on but for now it's just not in the cards.

I do have a few minutes to post so I will update a few things.

Fiscal year end is coming along nicely. There is hope that this audit will get done in less time than expected, which is more than 50% better than the previous two years. I've completely managed the two issues that we got written up for last year AND have had time leftover to focus on every other aspect of the balance sheet and reconcile all my accounts. On a technical level the organization is squeaky clean. All that's left to do is document procedures and prepare for the upcoming audit standards, which are new this year. Even with the vaca time I've taken, the sick time my assistant has had to take and all the other hiccups along the way, we are still right on schedule, even slightly ahead. Life is good and while I learned a lot from Salvation Army experience, more than was ever apparent at the time, I am much much happier manning my own ship again.

Life is going really well at home. Dane and I were up against some minor obstacles that we've talked about and tackled head on and are getting somewhere. It finally dawned on me that if I devoted half as much time to him as I did to work, friends, or engagements (like parades, belly dancing, 3 Day Walks, etc) that we would be an unstoppable force. My apiphone (or however that is spelled) has proven true thus far and while I've had to juggle my time differently and scale back on the amount of time we spend with friends and outside activities, we are making steady progress.

Financially I'm in a better position than I was this time last week. After the wedding we've had one financial blow after the next (cats going to the vet, emergency dental work, vasectomy, IUD, routine health care needs, and all sorts of expenses). We've managed to stay afloat, even if only a little bit with the help of each other, managing money inflow and my wonderful parents. However, last week in an effort to update my personal records to reflect the upcoming payroll change I inadvertantly double entered a paycheck and made real life payments to credit card companies based on that figure. Needless to say this threw me into the negative by almost $2000 and it took all the liquidation and borrowing power I had to recover. But that was after two payments hit my bank and I got assessed fees. Because of my error we lost out on the promotional APR's offered by the credit card that we borrowed all the wedding money, turning a $45 finance charge into a $160 finance charge (a month till the balance is paid - balance being over $12,000) and a $40 fee on top of the $25 fees my bank charged. I called my credit card company crying and pleading my case and was actually able to get the finance charge reversed, the promotional APR's reinstated AND the $40 fee credited back. And my bank reversed some of the $25 fees as they put on a block on my account so I couldn't deposit any money and ended up having to wire money from Dane's acct at a cost of $35. Needless to say I will be terminating my decade long relationship with this CO based credit union and have set up accounts here in WA. I've also taken the steps necessary to auto-pay my accounts the minimum on the day due so this never happens again. In the end I expect to make a full recovery in a month's time, but it was definitely a costly mistake. The fact that I'm an accountant only makes it worse.

My statistics class is very overwhelming but I'm not as invested in it as I was the last class. I was really excited to take law and extremely disappointed with how that whole ordeal turned out. But in the end not all was lost as the last class, conducted by the UOP Chair, was very informational on determining the differences between actual problems and symptoms of the problems. It's helped me with work and with this class, which I could care less about. I'll just be happy to get through it with a C. :-)

In other news, back to work, I have to toot my horn a little more. I'm very proud of myself and the work I've done. To recap I've reconciled all revenue to our donor software (not an easy task as money was miscoded and conveluted because I couldn't determine which donor it came from). Not only was I able to reconcile, I was able to isolate the problems that cause the variance to begin with and fix those. Also, all revenue and expense has been run through unrestricted funds. A little nonprofit Acct 101. All monies are unrestricted, temporarily restricted, or permentantly restricted. An example - endowments are permenantly restricted as their principal balances can never be spent, only their earnings. Without getting too complicated for a blog, all our monies were unrestricted and the financial reports were manipulated each month to come to a (wrong) figure for unrest/temp rest/ perm rest. I had to go in and determin at the income statement level what was what and then journal, then create accounts, then balance on the balance sheet and tie back to the income statement. It was way out of my league until I actually did and realized that I'm smarter than I give myself credit for. Of course I have an amazing accounting support system (thanks RBMBA and HG). Anyway, I've reconciled other stuff that was thought to be one thing but really turned out to be another and I'm down to my last project of unclaimed checks dating back to 2005 (OMG). After that, life is awesome and I can prep for the audit. THEN I'll have to buckle down on the budget for 2008. Jim and I are getting along very nicely now and I can tell he's confident in my capabilities. It's amazing to realize that I'm really starting to mature with this stuff. It feels weird to have a career and be happy and good at it. I still feel like a receptionist or A/P clerk at times.

Well enough of my rambling and building myself up. I'll post more on the wedding soon and the other posts I promised to write on. We just got the wedding DVD and I have to say that I'm very pleasantly surprised with how well it turned out.

More to come, I swear. :-)