Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Number Crunching

Once a month, the estimators are charged with “cost tracking”. In other words we have to make a detailed report of where the money went whether it was something we bought or someone else (generally the case) spent it.

Yes, we have a MACRO and it does make life a whole lot easier, but if not all the proper numbers are entered when a purchase order is created, it brings everything to a stop until we manually fix the error.

Unfortunately, when this happens we have to go back and do a bit of investigation to determine what the money was spent for. Then we subtract it from the miscellaneous slush fund and assign it to the correct category. All of this is still subject to the foibles of the human brain when it comes down to the nitty-gritty.

I was doing my damnedest to get mine done this afternoon, but nothing was going right. It’s a dead give away that something is wrong when you come up with 50 million for tax and freight on a project that had a 12 million budget. So, I quit.

There’s always tomorrow. Maybe the numbers will fall in the right order all by themselves. And, pigs fly. Don’t ya know.