Budgets & the Co-workers

The first of many endless reforcasting of the 2009 budget has started, with the first one due today.
It was a simple reforecasting, we were ordered to cut the salary increases. This in turn affected our tax calculations.
Stupidly, I was asked (after we all got clear instructions on this) “what am I suppose to do?”. As [...]

More Beanie Notes

…just been asked to cut another $500K from the budget.
On the bright side one large economic think-tank believes we are about to hit the lowest point in the economy in the next couple of weeks. So by New Year’s, theoretically, we should be seeing a slight upswing in the economy. I shall quietly and optimistically [...]

Budgets – what are they for?

As anyone who works within a corporate environment knows, there are budgets for everything – entertainment, travel, stationary, computer purchases, software, salaries etc. When one goes over budget then there must be salient reasons for this – which means explanations must be provided, as budgeting is an extremely time-consuming and painful process to go through, [...]

Fraudulent Cheques

One of the responsibilities of any half-way decent Finance Department is to monitor bank accounts – so that if there are any fishy transactions flowing through they can be caught and investigated in a timely fashion. Today I caught a “fishy transaction” – seems a cheque to one of our vendors was somehow “hijacked” and [...]