Tuesday, 13 March 2007

I worked from home today trying to catch up on reading, writing and budgeting.

I began by sorting through the sheaves of papers I’d bought home from the offices. Including reading time and taking notes this took two hours. I didn't spend much time considering my invitation to the NAVCA residential 2007 Chief Officers' meeting at the De Vere Belton Woods Hotel near Grantham. Most of the blurb focused on the attractions of the hotel and its golf course.

I enjoy a bit of luxury as much as the next person, but if I have to spend Watford CVS money pampering myself, I at least want to know what the business agenda will be. And anyway, I don't want to spend two days playing golf. And nor do I want to spend two days with other people who want to play golf.

Then I addressed the serious work of finalising our 2007-08 budgets. Very tricky.

Producing a solid reliable budget is never a straightforward task. Each project of course has to be accounted for separately. This ought to keep things simple. But Oh no.

All projects are carefully choreographed to leverage maximum income to deliver important strategic goals, and so all projects weave in and out of each other in a dance of great complexity. If you stay on the balcony and look down on the dance floor, this dance is a thing of marvellous beauty. But if you take your eye off the Masked Ball (so to speak) you soon find yourself lost down among the dancers where there is no pattern and the where the whirling numbers delight in stamping on your feet. And each additional project increases the complexity exponentially.

I made good progress for a bit. Then I realised that I had descended from the balcony and was lost somewhere down among the numbers. I had been lost for some time, just spinning round without purpose.

This is a curious sensation, perhaps akin to snow-blindness in arctic explorers. There can be few other direct connections between accountancy and arctic exploration. I took the hint and abandoned budgeting for the remainder of the day.

Instead, I turned my attention to up-dating people’s job descriptions – a task that has been on my To Do list since January’s appraisal meetings and which is now becoming urgent with Sue’s imminent departure.

By the end of the day I had successfully produced first drafts of all the new job descriptions. But this only emphasised how difficult it will be to replace Sue.