i'm taking an accounting class and i gotta ask: how do you do this. what does any of this mean. what's a number

aseariel:

unpretty:

omgimsuchadork:

unpretty:

somethingwittythiswaycomes:

unpretty:

unpretty:

unpretty:

welcome to X-Treme Sudoku

i love when people talk about accounting as a job that will be automated in the future as if i, an human being, do not struggle to interpret whatever the fuck this thing is that i’m supposed to believe is an invoice

there are people who think accounting is hard because they assume it’s math, and people who think accounting is easy because they assume the computer does all the math, and they’re both wrong because most of accounting is trying to figured out what the fuck they expect you to do with this

what does this mean. who is jeff. does he have a tax id number? is he an exterminator or did you buy rats. it looks like he wrote 300.00 but instead of putting a decimal he just put the zeroes in the second box but then forgot to do either on whatever that second number is. is that the amount of the discount or is that the total after the discount. are you trying to tell me these discount rats were tax deductible. if you think discount rats jeff is gonna use the kind of centralized invoicing system that would be necessary to let a computer deal with this, you are mistaken and he still wants his money.

The best part is when Jeff, trying to Get With The Times, sends you an email with a shitty scan of this paper as an attachment. It’s a .jpeg. And it’s sideways. And way bigger than it needs to be.

Goddamnit Jeff.

jeff called asking when he’d get paid and when you told him you never got the invoice because some idiot shoved it in his coat pocket and never actually turned it in, he helpfully scanned the carbon copy of the invoice at the lowest resolution you have ever seen in your life. the image is huge, but so are the pixels. you cannot confirm that he increased the image size thinking this would help his shitty scan, but you have an inkling. you’re still not clear on who in the department is supposed to have the purchase order you need before you can pay whatever this is, because jeff just kept referencing him as ‘your guy’. you don’t think jeff knows who it was, either. you just have to keep showing people this shitty scan and asking if they recognize it. jeff’s official business email is truckferguson69 at yahoo dot com.

A scan? Oh, no, Jeff can’t figure out the scanner. It’s a picture from his old digital camera from 2005 – because he does know how that works (finally), and it’s good enough, right? – and on an angle so that all the info at the top is bunched up and hard to read, like this

you attempt to explain to jeff that in order to pay him you must first have information on who he is and how to pay him. you attempted to mail him a w9 form using the address you managed to glean from his invoice, but it turns out that belongs to his estranged mother whose invoice book he borrowed. he insists you can just email him the form. you send him the pdf. two weeks later the guy who hired him asks why his friend jeff hasn’t been paid. you explain that you still don’t have his paperwork. he forwards you a screenshot of his email, where jeff for some reason emailed this department head his w9 twelve days ago instead of just replying to your email. he filled it out by screenshotting the pdf and drawing on it with his finger on his iphone. his legal name is richard mcleod and he lives a ten minute walk from your office.

This is it, this is accounting