Today! Well, maybe

28 Oct, 2005  Mundanity

Cost accountants get no respect. Really. I mean, who cares that a box costs forty-three cents and that extra little bit of padding makes the package one-half ounce over 1 pound?

Well, come to think of it, I do. (Saw that coming, didn’t you?)

We’ve been selling some things online — Plagioclase does the pricing & listing, I do the shipping & bookkeeping. Normally this works out ok, until he prices an item “to get it out of the house” that actually sits in the basement until some cheap bastard buys it some indeterminate time later. At which point I have to pack it (it’s like the night before Christmas every day here) and take it to the post office.

That half-ounce of carefully taped padding, combined with the net loss on the sale after the venue’s fees were deducted and the cost of the box means I might just have well given the thing and another dollar to some kid on the street — and then I would have saved some gas. At the very least I could have donated it and maybe gotten a tax deduction.

So today I’m going to start revamping the sales thingy so I can track this shit. The accountant inside me wants to allocate costs and note every expenditure against a sale (including to the weight of the box!) so we don’t lose money, and the slacker in me just wants to get rid of the crap no matter what. The accountant wants to do physical inventory (again) and list all the items (again) to make sure what happened the other day doesn’t happen again. (I couldn’t find something that had sold. Nowhere. And it wasn’t in my inventory list, so I didn’t know where to begin to look. Very frustrating.) The slacker just wants to wait until tomorrow to start thinking about it, or maybe I should just develop the whole system first and make sure it’s perfect and does everything I could ever want it to do and don’t forget it should go online and get info as needed and should give consignors up-to-the-minute information………..

And then I’ll write a blog entry and procrastinate some more.

(p.s. My dear patient friend, I’m working on it, really!)

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