The joys of accounting

Is it just me or is accounting just a way to make a simple idea overwhelming complex?

 

Okay, so I want to know how much money I am making, so essentially, I should keep track of all of my expenses and compare this against all the money I make (revenue) . If I work things out correctly I actually make a profit.

 

Okay, simple enough right? Here's what I've figured out so far:

 

A high level overview of how my company is doing is useful. Two tools that I can use here are the balance sheet and the income statement. Not only do they help tell me how my company is doing, but they can also help tell other potential investors how my company preforms.

 

Okay, fair enough, the data that makes up these documents comes from the General Ledger (GL). The GL is made up of several accounts which track what I owe other people, what other people owe me, how much I have spent in the past, and how much I have made.

 

Here's where it starts to get complicated, there are several 'common' ledger codes that don't seem to hit my income statement or balance sheet at all. They represent further breakdowns of my spending or earnings in such a way that the total value is important but not necessarily the smaller amounts.

 

Now it starts getting really complicated, if I want to make a movement in my General Ledger I have 2 ways to do this. One way is a 'journal entry'.  A journal entry lets me move $ from one G/L account to another. However sometimes to get something out of an account I have to 'credit' it and other times I have to 'debit' it. So the same activity needs a different transaction depending upon whether or not I am talking about earnings or expenses.

 

Since I have a background in computer science, I could not help but delve further into what is going on here. I further discovered that accounting software seems to keep track of EVERYTHING. For example, if I buy 20 widgets at $1.00 each, I shouldn't need to keep a third entry that shows the total (20 * $1.00 = $20.00). However, it seems accounting software DOES do this. Seems like a waste of time to me.

 

The second way I can make changes to my General Ledger is through an entry in what is called a 'sub-ledger'.  This part I pretty much get. A sub-ledger is just a sub-function or sub-program.  It is like the 'Work Instruction' level in ISO 9001. People can use various sub-ledgers such as a purchase order or enter an invoice which will automatically keep track of items in my general ledger (and thus my income statement, balance sheet) without the user having to worry about how this all ads together.

 

 

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Make Yahoo! Canada your Homepage Yahoo! Canada Homepage

Jonnah’s New Promotion: Interactive Story

Quality, Responsibility and Authority
Part I – Jonnah’s New Promotion

Jonnah is the production manager for Buttons-R-US Inc. He was recently promoted to production manger in the last few weeks. Although rather excited about his promotion is currently quite stressed. He has been putting in 80hrs weeks since his promotion and he is under a great deal of pressure from the district manager to ‘turn things around’ and improve the companies effectiveness and efficiency.

Prior to his promotion, Jonnah was a highly motivated night-shift production supervisor. Always energetic and ready for action he quickly became known as ‘The Guy’. He got things done when it looked like all hopes were lost. He pulled people together and took on new challenges that others dared not try. People around him respected his views and his opinions and often went to him for advice. These characteristics did not go un-noticed by the ‘higher-ups’. In fact, when the previous production manger left (on stress leave) everyone believed Jonnah was the right person for the job. ....

Your can read the full story here: Interactive Story: Jonnah's New Promotion

VPN and Hotel Access - What do I do ?

So the concept is pretty simple here:

 

1) Connect to my hotel, airport or internet cafe to surf the web.

 

2) After connecting a funny thing happens, whenever I try to go to ANY website. I get the same page back saying "Please pay us before you can use this Internet Service"..etc etc.

 

3) Okay, I find this kinda interesting how they are doing this, I submit my credit card information and VOILA, I'm on the Internet.

 

4) So then I decide to try my VPN connection, I connect successfully with no visible problems.

 

5) Then I try to visit my companies network, and I keep getting the message "Server is not available?"

 

 

What's going on? How can I do my business if I can't connect to my VPN? Everything looks okay I'm not getting any errors but I'm not able to do my work. Has this ever happened to you?

 

[Here's what I "discovered" so far]

 

1) I think that the ISP of the hotel or airport or whatever is using DNS Wildcards. (http://www.iab.org/documents/docs/2003-09-20-dns-wildcards.html). When I first get my connecting they setup (or connect me to) a DNS Server that has a wildcard *.*.*

such that ALL addresses return their IP Address..the one that tells me "PLEASE PAY US"..like they need the money :-)

 

2) After I pay, they either redirect me to a 'good' DNS server or remove the wildcard, then I can browse the web.

 

3) So then I connect to my VPN...which registers it's own DNS server (the one at my company) and this is where things get confusing.

 

It seems that somehow now when I look up an internal IP Address, my operating system (XP) first asks the DNS of the local connection (The Hotel/airport ISP). Now in a perfect world they would return "no data" and the request would pass to my Remote Connection which would then give me the correct IP.  But SOMETIMES, their wildcard still kicks in and then return me a bogus IP Address. something like 1.1.1.1 or 1.2.3.4, etc  and now my VPN is useless.

 

Possible Ideas for this:

 

1) Add an entry to the %windir%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file to make a static reference to my server with the proper IP

 

2) Change the binding order under "Advanced Settings" under the Network Connections options to put my remote connection at the top of the list.

 

I wonder how many others are affected by this problem.