Saturday, 30 December 2006

Recovery

There were some booming storms overnight, but the morning was quite bright and I also felt much better - well enough to tackle the WCVS’s accounts. I’d taken a back-up from the office and loaded them on my home PC. My first job was to review the last nine months of entries to check the codings. There were some obvious nominal codes missing (Priti and Sue had forewarned me of this) and little consistency in where transactions (even regular transactions) were allocated. It took me about six hours to go through all of the transactions checking the nominal codings. Fortunately, QuickBooks is fairly forgiving and (unlike Sage) allows me to simply edit transactions as I need.

Having checked the nominal codings, I looked at the project codings and found similar inconsistencies here. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to make many corrections here as I need to sit down with the various project managers. This is another task that I now need to squeeze into the first weeks of the new year.

Overall, the exercise has confirmed to me that we need to move with some urgency toward a far more centralised and controlled accounts environment. I will action this as soon as I possibly can.

Weather report

In the afternoon, the weather got much worse. How bad is the weather? So bad that Watford’s home game was abandoned due to torrential rain and a water-logged pitch. Pity they couldn’t have abandoned the game at White Hart Lane.

While I worked on the accounts, Jackie single-handedly removed the xmas decorations and started preparing for the redecorating that needs to start early in the new year after our recent flood damage. At some point, Bobby called to say he was safely back in the UK and would be in WGC sometime on New Year’s Eve.

Life styles

Jackie and I wondered whether or not we’d be well enough to go out on New Year’s Eve. Talk turned to life-styles generally, and we each agreed that we needed more exercise. We’ve not over-indulged too much over xmas, but we are still looking forward to eating better.

Then we talked about the pros and cons of smoking. On the pros side, we both use cigarettes to help us relax, and we both quite enjoy 2-3 cigarettes a day. On the cons side, it is not very sociable, it’s damned expensive, and of course I smoke far more than the 2-3 a day that I actually enjoy. The discussion was finely balanced. Then, Jackie said she had heard (at the GP surgery where she works) that smoking isn’t actually very good for you. Apparently, smoking can cause all sorts of horrible conditions from heart disease and cancer to impotence and indigestion. You think they would publicise these things a bit more. Anyway, that decided us. We will give up smoking in the new year.

And get more exercise. And eat more healthily. Oh yes.