I'm curretly on the 9th email of an exchange with accounting,regarding examining land surveyor fees, and why one invoice is $55 and one is $140, etc, etc, etc, This doesn't include the face to face conversations with the local admin people here.
To really appreciate the beauty of this system (18 pages of accounting codes), remember that we have to differentiate between our rebar, which is coded "62237 Stakes, lath, pins", and the caps we put on the rebar, which is "62235 Engineering supplies and equipment less than $5000"
😐
sounds like a case of bureaucratic lice.
You need to delouse.
> I'm curretly on the 9th email of an exchange with accounting,regarding examining land surveyor fees, and why one invoice is $55 and one is $140, etc, etc, etc, This doesn't include the face to face conversations with the local admin people here.
>
> To really appreciate the beauty of this system (18 pages of accounting codes), remember that we have to differentiate between our rebar, which is coded "62237 Stakes, lath, pins", and the caps we put on the rebar, which is "62235 Engineering supplies and equipment less than $5000"
>
> 😐
You could put together a report of the amount of non-billable time versus your pay rate which you have spent on this inanity and email it back to them.
I've always had a problem with over-bloated admin departments. They appear to spend a nickel to save a penny in order to justify their existence. A company I previously worked for hand enters paper time cards into the payroll software to this day.
Thanks for the post, Rankin. Us solo guys need something like this to cheer us up occasionally when humping all our equipment out of the woods at the end of a hot day.:-)
> You could put together a report of the amount of non-billable time versus your pay rate which you have spent on this inanity and email it back to them.
I'd be tempted to add a small blurb at the bottom of each email reply that shows the time spent on the most recent task, with a total of all time spent working on this particular issue.
A-men my brother!
Ditto
> Thanks for the post, Rankin. Us solo guys need something like this to cheer us up occasionally when humping all our equipment out of the woods at the end of a hot day.:-)
you got that right. it's no wonder mom & pop outfits can charge so much less and still make a profit.
That sounds like
when we were bought by a large national engineering firm. When I went to work there in 1985 there were 35 employees, in 2003 when we were bought we were up to 65 employees. Then overnight I was one of 4000. As one friend said we were an engineering company run by accountants. That's why I left.
Andy
Reminds of a time when we were all mandated to attend some corporate wide meeting that lasted well over half the day. 90% of that meeting had zero to do with the surveyors in the company. IN fact, the only thing I remember about that meeting was getting a lecture about how we all need to be sure our time is at least 90% billable - ESPECIALLY YOU FIELD PERSONEL (i.e. you field monkeys - uh, I mean land surveyors).
Go figure.
E.
Reminds me of a former employer who insisted that ALL employees attend the two day class on Defensive Driving. It didn't matter whether or not you had a drivers license, you were to attend anyway.
I haven't filled out any kind of time card in over 6 years.
don't miss it for one non-billable second!!
Accountants think they run the world. They are only one step up from lawyers.
Accountants DO run the corporate world.
The first decade that I worked, our company (not a surveying firm) was run by engineers and they had accountants to tell them how they were doing. By the time I retired, we were organizing projects the way the accountants wanted it, reporting in much detail the way the accountants wanted it, had little freedom to rearrange the work as circumstances developed because we were accountable by the pre-established schedule, and had much less time for actual productive work.
The public often doesn't realize how much State employees dislike the paperwork nonsense.
California is gunning for vehicles. Now my supervisor has to enter my truck mileage into a computer interface within a few days of the first of every month or the truck will get flagged as underutilized and auctioned off. They are even doing that with Fire Engines.
Ha, you're dreaming.
A lot of the requirements are imposed by the Legislature; good luck with that. Every time the legislature imposes a tracking requirement it takes more staffers to track whatever it is that they want tracked. Be careful what accounting codes you use because the wrong one may trigger some stupid tracking requirement.
Soft Costs vs Hard Costs & Govt Bean Counters
Govt bean counters, while being completely anal about the hard costs of supplies and fees paid to outside entities, have absolutely no perception of the value of the time of internal agency employees. The idea that the value of someone's time within the agency spent addressing questions about hard costs may exceed the amount of that hard cost and thereby, in real terms, increase the trus cost to the agency by perhaps several hundred percent is so alien to them that they will not even allow such discussion past their auditory filters.
At the last agency I worked at, I spent hundreds of man-hours per year looking through my 1 year and 3 year crystal ball in order to devise a proposed budget that would then be reviewed and approved by my division supervisor, and then by my deputy director, and then by the deputy director of finance after being reviewed by one or more of her accountants and/or fiscal analysts, and then be approved by the agency director, and then be reviewed and approved by the County CAO's office and the County Auditor's office, and then finally be approved by the Board of Supervisors. At any of those steps, I might have been questioned about the need for certain items, like why did I need new tripods since I hadn't bought any in the past 5 years, and my predecessor had bought one 3 years prior to that. Once they accepted my answer for that, it was why do you need to spend $350 on a tripod when the maintenance division just bought some last year for $100 each. And so it typically went with several items and supplies each year.
But the annual budget wasn't what I was actually approved to spend. It merely provided a framework for what I was allowed to ask to spend. With each individual purchase, I was required to officially check with 3 vendors and get written estimates and then ask to purchase the item(s) from the vendor with the cheapest price. This request required review by the division supervisor and the agency's financial services people, with additional approvals by various officials and offices at thresholds of $500, $1500, and $5000.
One time, one of my guys needed a calculator. I found an HP33 for about $40 at the local Walmart, but they were not on the approved vendor list and I was told that I would not be reimbursed for an out of pocket expenditure for it. So I went through the process, found the best price of $65 through approved vendors, submitted the proper forms, answered the obligatory questions ("Why do you feel you need to spend some of the money we said you can spend? Did you have a calculator listed among the several hundred line items in the budget you submitted last March? No? You will need to fill out another form justifying the purchase of an item not appearing in the approved budget."), got the appropriate approval, and was nearly shut down by a $8/hr fiscal analyst's assistant because my crystal ball had not foreseen replacing a calculator several months earlier, and finally got the calculator delivered about 5 weeks after seeing it at Walmart. I calculated that the cost to the county was somewhere between $300 and $350 for an HP33, considering the time spent by all involved.
Upon presenting a rough accounting of the hard cost of the calculator along with the soft costs of the time spent by all involved, and questioning why a unit supervisor (me) couldn't just make such a purchase by my own authority and have it automatically covered, it was explained to me by someone with a very straight face that these standard procedures had all been put in place by the Auditor's office to prevent financial loss to the county through misuse of funds.
There's no reasoning with such people!
Soft Costs vs Hard Costs & Govt Bean Counters
Evan whatever you do never ever ever use the object code for "paper" when you get records from the County Recorder. That will trigger the recycled paper reporting requirement by the vendor. Good luck getting the County Recorder to comply with your request to fill out State paperwork stating the percentage of recycled paper their office uses.
It took me and our in-house accounting person 4 hours to convince the HQ accounting section that we purchased information, not paper.
Our in-house accounting person told me when he asked about object codes they would always answer it doesn't matter use any of them. Then he said you guess (paper is reasonable) and it unknowingly triggers some stupid requirement. So he and I went through the multi-page list to find a code that was not likely to trigger any reporting requirements.
All for one copy of a Deed.
Soft Costs vs Hard Costs & Govt Bean Counters
One time a Deputy Director turned down our request for 0.5mm pencil leads and paper. He was gunning for anything to cut costs (budget had been cut) and he thought Surveyors could do without pencil lead, LOL.
Soft Costs vs Hard Costs & Govt Bean Counters
> One time a Deputy Director turned down our request for 0.5mm pencil leads and paper. He was gunning for anything to cut costs (budget had been cut) and he thought Surveyors could do without pencil lead, LOL.
Yeah yeah yeah ... we had a mandated contract for pens ...
Pens produced by blind people ... which didn't work very well!
(Possibly the "q.c." at their company?)
