Accounting can be hilarious at times...

Well, there are definitely those times when accounting can be hilarious at times. I know for Non-Accountants that's not that easy to imagine.
Well today I had a conversation with one of our suppliers, that certain invoices appear to be unpaid. So I told the guy to send me a list what according to their accounting department is undpaid. As soon as I got the list I got started with it right away. Not only was there a difference between the invoices that have been paid and that didn't appear on their list but also the amount of certain incoices didn't quite match up. That the payments and open invoices don't necessarily macht up is nothing unusual. That's something that happens on a daily basis. But the amount of the invoices has to match. So I took out the originals of the incoices just to check if we had entered them correctly...and we had done just that- Next I checked with the original banking statements and the money we had transfered was OK as well.
That meant I had something of a riddle at my hand. And I'm just the right guy for that...since I love to figure out stuff like that and I'm quite good at it. Didn't take me long to figure out where the problem was. Apparently our supplier had changed the amount on one of the invoices after he had sent it to us. That's a big NO NO  in accounting. Actually doing so makes you criminally responsible for that.
So I talked to those guys and it turned out quite quickly that the didn't have any clues about the GoB (General Rules for correct Accounting). I talked with this guys for almost 40 minutes and pointed the out how GoB works. And that changing invoices in any form after the fact is something that must never ever be allowed to happen. That guy I was talking to gave some explanation about that the software had done that. But I know better than to buy that story, since no accounting software is going to allow something like that. In the end I sent him a list how we had entered the invoices they sent to us and which invoices we had already paid for. He promised he would use to list the check with his head of finance and clear up the differences.
Being an accountant for over 20 years I know what that statement acutally means. They know that they've screwed up royally, but they're afraid to say so. If they had said so I could have told them the way ti reconsiliate the differences. Having to explain to someone the basic rules of accounting and realizing at the same time that you tell someone something completely new to them...well that provided entertainment for me for a couple of hours. That set the basis for the joke in our accoutning department...that I should send in my resume to them as their possible new head of finance. So all in all we got a really good laugh out of it!