Behind the Scenes: A Financial Rollercoaster at My New Job

Recently, my role evolved dramatically at my new mid-sized company, leading to an unexpected dive into the complexities of our financial processes. As a certified bookkeeper with nearly a decade of experience using QuickBooks in a smaller organization, I thought I was prepared for any challenges that might arise. However, what I encountered was far from the streamlined systems I had grown accustomed to.

The financial infrastructure here seems tenuously held together — if I’m being honest, it resembles a patchwork of outdated methods struggling under the weight of so many diverse income streams. The company handles payments from a myriad of sources, each with its own quirks and procedures. This necessitates using various internal systems to correctly attribute payments to their respective clients — a task that has now expanded to include the management of our deposit register.

To call our deposit register merely a register would be an understatement. It is more of a makeshift VBA interface layered over an immense 100,000-line spreadsheet. This single document, containing the entire financial history of the company, is buried within a complex network of subfolders on a shared drive and can only be edited by one person at a time. While I admire the creativity of the person who designed this system — it does possess an impressive range of functions — the reality is that I now have to enter most checks twice: once in our internal software to properly associate the payment with the right client, and then again in the deposit register.

To make matters more complicated, our main internal system doesn’t support various other income streams, leaving me to juggle about 100 checks each day alongside my other administrative responsibilities. Moreover, I must navigate the ongoing demands from multiple stakeholders who each have differing priorities. The one commonality? Everyone acknowledges that our current system is a persistent pain point, and no one has proposed a viable solution, which is precisely why the status quo has persisted for so long.

What started as a temporary workaround is now fundamental to our operations, even though it is widely disliked. The team is looking to me for guidance on potential major changes — but how do we move forward? Should we develop software equipped with templates for the most common check variations for import via Optical Character Recognition? Or should we consider implementing an AI solution that can autonomously identify fields for export? We could even explore expanding our internal software’s functionality for better export options. The question looms large: How can we ultimately phase out this