So, as I periodically scribe here, whenever I delve into the depths of budgets and forecasts and actuals and so forth, I usually end up with a huge migraine, because the data is scattered about, largely in the hands of an internal IT accounting group that is sometimes very responsible, other times not so much.
Not infrequently, I discover something that it looks like they’ve done wrong. It might be they have obsolete pay rates for people, or are being inconsistent in a certain fringe burden, or something tweaky and individual like that. About half the time, it turns out I’m right, about half the time it turns out I don’t know what I’m talking about (though that, more often than not, is because I am not privy to the Sooper Sekrit Spreadsheets That Explain All).
So my boss has been pulling out his hair trying to find out why they’ve been telling him that he’s a half million dollars over his labor budget. Given that none of his directs could account for more than a fraction of that didn’t make the Boss’s life any easier. (For the record, I’m probably one of the two of the Boss’s directs most diligent at hammering this stuff out, based on feedback I’ve gotten.) But, as part of that, he managed to pry loose the current Sooper Sekrit Spreadsheet That Explains All (SSSTEA), or from which the IT accounting people were doing their forecasts.
So I started comparing its numbers to my numbers. The raw figures seemed right, the fringes good, etc. My numbers and their numbers pretty much matched on the front end, but they were showing higher final labor costs across the board.
Poked and prodded some more, and discovered something I couldn’t quite believe was right, even when I confirmed it two or three different ways. We operate on a 1 October fiscal year, but a 1 January review/raise cycle. Since the going-forward forecasting they were doing was as of February, they’d jiggered various numbers in their overly complex SSSTEA to reflect the salaries with various increases for the new year.
But … as far as I could tell … they still had the calculations in there to give everyone an average X% merit increase on 1 January, too, in addition to having factored the actual increases into the raw numbers. And, lo and behold, all their numbers were X% over what I thought they should be.
As I said, I tried to figure this out about three different ways (including looking at an actual live person’s salary, drawn from the HR system). I sent a very politely phrased note to the IT accounting people, attaching a couple of spreadsheets (including the SSSTEA), and spelling out (with cell references) what I thought was happening (“or am I missing something obvious?”).
Silence.
I also CCed my boss about this, who was quite interested (obviously) in what the response was.
Silence.
Then, last evening, on my Blackberry:
From: [My boss]
Subject: I’ve got a secretIt appears that you are right about the X% oops on the merit increase. News at 7 and congrats!
I tried to hit him on for a finders fee, but he wasn’t feeling that congratulatory.
I think I just paid for all those hours I’ve banged against those numbers.