T’is The Season…………

Christmas to the New Year is the season to be jolly. Not only because of the holiday spirit and partying but frankly due to the fact that I’m making money. This January, the tune is different. It is the season of well, paying bills. This is the time when your bills kept coming in droves and the collectors are at your door every second of the day. However, the good news is it won’t happen until the middle of the month, which would provided me some more time to take a deep breathe. However, it doesn’t mean that the first few weeks of January is fun. This is the season of number crunching! Today, January 3 is my first day of work but I already started working since the 1st doing accounting work for my company. For accountants and I’m not one, this is the season when you do the “tallying” work of how your company fared the last year, specifically, this is the time when you sort out the numbers from the mess left over from the holiday’s frenzied pace. This is the season when one makes the year-end report, the year-end financial summaries, and balancing the seemingly “unbalanceable” financial statements. Not to mention the auditing works, inventory updates, maintenance check ups and others. It would be good if one has an accounting staff to work with but for small companies like mine, it’s part of the Christmas wish list that Santa kept on forgetting. And so, here I am, pouring through the paper works, pacing around the office trying to keep my sanity and running around the factory “inventorying” and auditing. Definitely, this is the season not to be jolly at but dread about. In addition to that, this is the season when one would experience a roller coaster sort of emotion ranging from sheer joy to down right exasperation. It is “rewarding” and exciting when one is tallying sales especially if it is better than last year but one could get really exasperated and uneasy when one is counting the costs and expenses and in the end, it is quite disheartening that all you work for in a year translate to a disappointing figure. However, it would be a consolation if the profit is within expectation or better than last year and a reason to celebrate when the profit is beyond one’s expectations. And there you have it, the drudgery and unkindness of accounting work, not knowing how the numbers would add up in the end while going through the unending tasks. But my work doesn’t stop there. After the number crunching comes the evaluation period. What went wrong? What did we do right? What should we be doing next? Any bright idea? Stuffs like that. I should have taken a looooooooooooooooonger vacation before going back to work but I can’t. Such is the curse of a business owner, one has to look ahead and keep a pace if not ahead of competition. One cannot simply afford to be “left” behind. I need another vacation after this.