Increase Font Size    Decrease Font Size In recent years, the larger Torres Strait islands have formed their own community councils with funding provided by the Commonwealth and State governments. Those councils, often governing populations of fewer than a hundred people, employ white administrators with such exaltant titles as "Chief Executive Office" and salaries and other emoluments to match. Despite the generous salaries, few professional people go to such remote places to engage in work which is often banal and never challenging enough to further their careers. Modern-day carpet-baggers had filled the void and I was sitting across from one on the balcony of the hotel. He was a "C.E.O" on one of the outer islands and had come down to T.I., ostensibly on an all-expenses-paid business trip but primarily to sample the delights of what amounted to the bright city-lights for one living so remote. Being fellow-travellers and, like "ships passing in the night", not likely to meet again, he had soon told me his life story: divorce and a number of business failures had seen to it that he had come to the Torres Strait "with the arse hanging out of his pants" but only a few months into the job, he already sported a very healthy bank-balance. We had "talked shop" and it had become apparent to me that he was in big trouble with his computerised accounting system of which he knew very little but in which I had specialised for years and become something of an expert. I mentioned this to him and he replied that he might call on my services in the future. So it didn't come as a complete surprise when a few weeks after my return to "Riverbend" I received a call from him, asking me if I could come up to his little island to help him out. Yes, I could but only in a few weeks' time. Should we in the meantime discuss the nature of the assignment by email? And so the whole sorry story unravelled of how he had arrived on the island some five months earlier to operate the already installed ATTACHÉ accounting software but didn't know how. Instead of persevering with it, he abandoned it altogether in the belief that another, simpler (?) package, MYOB, would solve all his problems. Abandoning the existing accounting package halfway through the accounting year was "Mistake # 1." Thinking that buying another package and attending a two-week all-expenses-paid training course in Cairns - what a nice holiday if you can get it! - would make him an instant "accountant" was "Mistake # 2." Now he was utterly lost with the existing accounting data in bits and pieces across two different accounting systems, outstanding GST returns piling up, and the end of the financial year approaching. Not that the accounting situation was beyond help; after all, it consisted of little more than the 'recycling' of the community's dole money plus grants coming from six other sources, a total turnover of some $2 million a year. A relatively small business enterprise for which to produce an annual balance sheet, profit & loss statement, and tax return, plus periodic GST returns and separate expenditure statements to the grant-givers of how their grants had been spent. However, he had his own peculiar ideas of how to proceed: instead of "departmentalising" the six different grants and their respective expenditure within the one accounting entity (which, after all, it was with ONE balance sheet, ONE profit & loss statement; ONE tax return; ONE GST activity statement, etc), he was going to set up SIX distinctly different data set - the mind boggles !!! - to ensure that there would be no mix-up between the grants. I screamed, "No, No, No" which could be heard all the way up to the Torres Strait, and emailed him immediately to suggest that he use MYOB's Job Costing feature which would lend itself admirably to separating all grants within the ONE data set. He hadn't even known that such a feature existed! I asked him to seriously consider it and NOT to proceed with his peculiar 'Cookie Jars' accounting method. His reply was pretty immediate, "With respect to your views, I am going to start July 1st with separate files as I am seeking effectiveness for this organisation." That was "Mistake # 3." Logging onto an email account is relatively quick and straightforward when compared to logging into an accounting software with its password and other verification processes after which one has to navigate through a very busy "menu" to get to the desired function. Now imagine an invoice for the supply of goods and/or services which is funded by more than one grant: it would require having to sucessively log into and out of separate data sets to process the whole of the invoice. And the same would have to be done when paying the invoice and entering all sorts of other accounting data. If that isn't bad enough, imagine to then having to re-combine all those separate data sets in order to obtain a balance sheet, a profit & loss statement, figures for the GST acitivity statement, or to do a bank account reconciliation! That "re-combining" would have to be done manually as the separate data sets don't "talk" to each other. The mind boggles! How do they recruit people with such limited understanding of their jobs? That man was obviously not just geographically at the end of the line. Not surprisingly, I thought it best not to get involved in what was shaping up to be another disaster story.