Usman’s Lesson

Wednesday, 03 September 2008

I’m not a numbers person. I don’t care about accounts and purchase orders and T ledgers and all that other business accounting stuff. I’m here to build capacity for fish farms, not to balance books. Granted I’ve done up budgets. You have to for workshops and proposals. That’s not so bad, list the things you want, get quotes for their costs, pass in the paperwork to the boss and the treasurer and there you go. Done. That’s all the financial management I need.

After outlining a budget for the workshops I plan to hold in LESS THAN 2 WEEKS (OMG!) I was pleased to have found out to have been approved MK150,000 – a little less than I asked for but enough to get the job done. Today I went to the accountant to see how I would actually get the money so I could procure the supplies and arrange logistics (oh that sounds so IPMP!). When the accountant looked at the bank statement to confirm the MK150,000 deposit from my donor agency he said that ‘actually you only have MK147,800 to work with’. Que? What’s that? As it turns out the NGO I work for did not pay their monthly banking service fees of MK2200 and were in the red, as a result the bank took their service fee from my workshop funds (which were transferred via direct deposit between their bank accounts). Needless to say I was not impressed. The accountant was standing in front of me saying that ‘No sorry you have less money for your workshop now.’ I was ripping mad. I mean get your act together. Shouldn’t you have money allocated to pay your bills already? Your debts should not be paid from my funding, which is strictly allocated. Which I am responsible for and must show receipts for the total 150,000 as laid out in the itemized budget. I just can’t say oops I’m not sure where that 2200 went. So instead of getting mad at his incompetence I simply said that, ‘This is not good enough. Are you going to tell the beneficiaries that I have to cancel a workshop because you didn’t have the accounts in order?’

It was at this point that all Usman’s tips and tricks for account juggling came back to me. It was hard to follow most of the material in his financial management class last winter, but I do remember the cook the book section. So the accountant and me looked at the budget and tried to figure out where we could rearrange funding and switch costs to different accounts. In the end we reduced the fuel costs on my budget by the 2200 and I was assured that we could re-allocate that fuel cost from another pre-existing account. Whew! Who knew I’d be cooking the books in Malawi using Usman’s ‘under-the-table’ lessons?

After sorting the budget crisis out, I sat down and thought about the money that was re-allocated. At first when I heard that I would be short 2200 I was mad. Its sounded like a lot of money. However, when I converted the value I realized it was only $15. That’s a whole lotta fuss over a little money. But it’s the principle of the matter right? And to put it in perspective, the beneficiaries of these workshops are people who live on <$1/day, so yeah that $15 is important.