Inventories

This past week has made me both resentful and grateful for what I have in my current job.

Our company's year end was Sunday, which means we have to have a solid count of our inventory.  When you have as much inventory as we do, it's a big job.  And if you're the Controller, it means it's ultimately your job to make sure it all gets done right.  Hours of planning, conference calls, scheduling, and running around went into this.

Thankfully, I work with a team of inventory managers who all understand how important this is.  Unfortunately, our computer system is not as understanding.  Some counts we did manually, others we were able to scan bar codes.

Then after my teams finish their counts and give me their reports, I share the reports with my financial statement auditors (the work I used to do) and let them count a few items to test our work.

There's a unique division of power between the Controller and the auditor.  As the auditor, I had the power to make as many test counts as I want, keep all the necessary employees around while I made my counts, and to request any documents I needed or wanted to see.  As the Controller, I have the power to tell the auditor when he/she is counting, and how much information is included on the reports (like prices to show what each item is worth).

And after spending all day Friday and Saturday getting the financial statement auditors happy, my bank auditors showed up this week, and they decided that they wanted to count all the inventory today, so we went and did it all again.  Upside: I was able to wear jeans to work today.  Downside: nothing else on my to-do list got done.

I am very tired.