Working Holiday

After five days working for Butterflies I am in full swing.

 

This week I have been re-writing the finance manual.  The existing one wasn’t being used for reasons I shan’t go into, so I have had to interview the accounts team extensively to establish what procedures they perform and what controls are in place, and then put it in writing for future reference.   In effect, it’s a controls audit. 

 

I haven’t run screaming for the hills (or, in this case, the Thar Desert) because the business is simple enough for me to have a proper, comprehensive overview of the whole thing, and I have been making lots of genuinely useful recommendations.  In spite of my dislike for audit I nonetheless picked up a lot of knowledge whilst I was working in that industry and it’s good to be putting it to use.

 

After this, Thomas wants me to help devise a medium-term planning system (income and expenditure over the next five years), and a monthly budget vs. actual variance report system.  This will rely 99% on the project coordinators, the people who are close to the ground and are best placed to forecast the future project expenditure.  The remaining 1% relies on the top brass, who have an understanding of how he future donation revenue prospects are looking.

 

The problem is that the project coordinators are not accountants or even financially-minded.  I just know that this is going to be the sticking point.  I can build some fancy Excel models to help them do all this, sure, but without basic, reliable information it’s pointless.  I’ll have to wait and see what happens.

 

The final thing I’ll be doing is providing some Excel training.  Surender assures me that he could really do with some help, and that his knowledge is pretty basic.  God knows I’ve spent enough time on Excel over the past five years.  I earnestly hope that it has resulted in some useful knowledge that I can pass on.

 

So, as the first week draws to an end, I’m making good progress.  On the first day I was worried for a few hours that no-one would really have anything for me to do.  That hasn’t come to pass, thankfully.   I’m going to be pretty busy.