Accountants Tricks and Energy Savings

'Have you ever been dragged down by someone that thinks like an account... "

Yes,

My accountant ex-wife. She drug me way down.

Welcome to a large club.

Being in engineering in my early career, it was my job to improve processes and invent new ways to get the job done.

When the job went to production, some line worker would reap the rewards of my labor.

I was paid more and had my own office as my reward. That was OK with me.

Assigning patent rights over to your employer sucks, too. Especially when they get a lot of money and you get a wall plaque.

Such is life in the fast lane.

Maybe I am just getting too apprehensive as I grow older but it seems to me that in today's workplace the situation has gotten much worse and is grossly supplemented with the "spin it up and put it out" ethics.

This closely fits the old adage of; "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance then baffle them with bull$h!#."

Unfortunately I have never been good at the baffle part of negotiating due to my factual personality and instead tend to get frustrated and pout.

I appreciate your presence here on CR4. As far as dealing with "politics" at work, I used to "tolerate" it. As I've gotten older however, my tolerance for BS has decreased. Now, I don't accept it. Once I have given the facts of whichever situation I am dealing with, it's in their court and I am not worrying about it at all.

I baffle them by being able to articulate faster than they can process. I do it with a great, positive attitude and it works!

You don't need to defend the wall plaque in court.
Count your blessings.

Sounds like politics to me. The easier some idea is to understand, the more likely it is to be stolen.

Yep. What astounds me is the brazen gall some people have when stealing or taking credit for other's accomplishments and ideas.

Ethics? Honesty? Respect? Integrity? Loyalty? Competency? All are disappearing quickly.

If you're paying $45K for a $20K car, you may need some accounting in your life.....jus sayin'....

My point is that accounting is not the same as understanding financing which includes the future value of money and much, much, more. There seems to be no shortage of accountants. People who obtain really long term loans have no appreciation for the power of compounded interest. Some accounts get that and others don't.

The worst part is that regulatory committees only regulate a small portion of the actual bill. When the utility companies are allowed to tack on all kind of surcharges, there are no rules that mandates how much of a loan and associated interest rate that really represents. Some accountants insist that those extra fees are not applicable to cost savings. I find that to be very short sighted.

This is a discussion for Gavilan.

http://insights.globalspec.com/article/1946/low-pay-not-education-to-blame-for-stem-skills-gap-study

Professional accountants are a very important aspect of any business, may it be small, medium or large. They use various tricks to help you with daily bookkeeping and filing your tax returns. Also, a professional accountant from small business accounting NJ is necessary to help an individual manage their personal finances. You will have minimum worries and could focus on your business growth.

....in the UK Limited companies are required by law to have audited accounts - and that requires a Chartered Accountant.

One of the grossly wrong accountant statements that has always irritated me is:

"We cannot consider eliminating hourly maintenance labor costs as a cost savings because we have to pay the employees when they are at work whether they do anything or not."

We all know that all labor costs other than preventative maintenance equals "unplanned system downtime" which in turn equals "unplanned loss of production" which equals "loss of sales revenue" which then equals "increased overhead costs" and all these components drive the company's profit margin downward.

Based on these facts I cannot in good faith embrace that eliminating labor costs from project or operations budgets is not a cost savings.

In fact most places ignore their PM functions because the downtime caused by equipment unreliability is so high they do not have the manpower for anything other than "putting out fires".

"Figures do not lie but liars figure."

Happy Holidays!

And I thought I was the only one who had the labor cost saving thing totally ignored. It even applies to salaried persons. I had a long "discussion" with the highest up at one point about the cost of cutting a purchase order. His take, it doesn't cost anything except the cost of the paper of the actual PO (bear in mind this is before the wide spread use of computers - mainly at that time to crunch accounting data. My response - not very well received as you can imagine - what about the person who recognizes the need, the time of the person(people in larger organizations) to review and approve the requisition, the time of the buyer or PA to source whatever is needed, the cost of the clerk to put the info into the accounting system, the cost to actually print out the PO, and last but not least the cost of the stamp to send it(really dating myself on that one).

Bosses reply was as you stated - "they are here and being paid anyway so it doesn't cost anything". I gave him my figures-based on what I figured each person was making and stated outright that it cost us about $75.00 to cut a PO.

No wonder that that company is no longer in business. And,,, definitely a contributing factor to my earlier departure as well.

I made myself a rule very early on, I yell at/argue with the boss only twice - if I am not asked to leave, I leave voluntarily. There has to be a point where you lose respect.

It sounds like the accountants are viewing labour as a fixed cost instead of a variable. This is true if there is nothing else for the employee to do once his task is completed.

In this case you may want to argue that your labour savings can eliminate a position, or overtime.

the accountant is just looking for a measurable once the project is done. If you can't point to direct savings on the P&L then your project may be hard to justify.

I have seen companies dragged down by such people, twice!! StorageTek and Sun MicroSystems.....

An accountant knows the cost of everything - and the value of nothing.

Accounting, costing, financing, budgeting, or whatever you call it is very difficult to deal with if you are a small company when you engineer and accountant and are effectively working for yourself.

Your personal cost is an overhead along with all the other costs that have to be paid whether busy or not - except that you are at the end of the queue on pay and as often happens there is nothing left in the pot to pay your wages.

So you borrow money until business picks up and gross profit is enough to cover the overheads and wages and loans - and in good times - enough to make a profit as well - sharing it with the tax-man.

We had an interesting costing exercise once when we had a profitable product sold in minor quantities to the end user at full list price, when by random events one of our competitors for the same product asked if we could supply them at trade prices - we said yes because we had lots of 'off-cuts' that could be made up by 'idle staff' when sometimes slack on our main product line. In effect there were no real costs or labour costs to take into account when agreeing a sales price - because any income was a 'profit' - and a contribution to our overheads.

Our selling price for this item was therefore well below market price so to speak, which put our customer in a very competitive position to make more profit for themselves when selling on. To the extent that they sold a lot and came back for more, and in grand trade tradition, expected us to give better quantity discounts for large orders.

For CR4 members who recognise this sort of situation, you will be one step ahead of me now - yes! you are right we would have had to buy new materials at full price (no off cuts anymore) and employ extra staff to make the product - and all at a lower price.

We would have been able to make a profit at it, but the serious risk was that it would depend on our customer staying with us (who were also our competitors), when they could take their order elsewhere at any time, if we did not play ball on prices and discounts, and worse, having to divert our limited valuable resources from profitable products to meet their order deadlines. We said no. Sorry.

n fact we sold out to them and shipped our production line for them to make their own - and we buy from them on the odd occasion.

It was profitable while it lasted.

Our main line products have a sales price largely governed by competitive market forces imposed by the big boys - and that is what we charge. Our production costs are direct material costs per item that have to carry a (guessed) % of fixed overheads - with all sales income treated as a contribution.

If we sell enough we are in business.

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PS: For those who want to be unkind to accountants; here's a puzzle.

You are in dire circumstances trapped in a cage with three starving lions. Your have a gun with three bullets. What is the best way to save yourself?

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