Running over budget

Running over budget

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I am a senior in a firm of Accountancy Prcatice. Due to meticulous working, I am constantly running over budget. I am willing to take aborad any suggestions. Would being a self employed solve the problem? Constant writing off time would not look healthy for the practice as well as for me. Please help.
Shortland Shortlanda

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By User deleted
21st Jul 2006 10:22

Need to explain things a little more
You say you are running over budget due to your meticulous working - are you sure?
When you compare your file to the prior year, what is the difference?

Is the problem that you found it hard to understand what work to do? (some files seem to miss out of lot of link papers and are very hard to follow)- if so you should have discussed this with your manager at the time
Did you prepare a lot more analysis?
Did you not follow the same concept of materiality and chase up small errors when it was uncommercial to do so? (Extra tax on a £10 error is far less than your charge out rate to find it)
Did you spend too much time reticking reconciliations to find errors you had made? (for example on a bank rec you can usually check pretty easily whether it is receipts or payments that are not balancing quickly)

I would recommend that on your next job you do a complete time analysis - so long doing the bank rec, so long preparing P&L analysis etc., and see where the time is seriously mounting up. Then you can ask for help with how to fix that specifically or even if that is far too long a time for the section involved.

Good luck

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By neileg
20th Jul 2006 14:32

Fit for purpose
Engineers have a concept of 'fit for purpose'. That means that you do what is needed to meet the requirements of the task, and no more. I fully understand that you feel you are applying your own high standards, but if you are continually overrunning the budget, then you are either being inefficient or you are doing too much.

I would expect your audit manager or partner should be helping you address these issues. As you suggest, unrecoverable time helps no-one. Have you raised this with them? Do you have a staff appraisal process where this could be reflected?

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By shortland
25th Jul 2006 12:33

Thank you for all your comments and time. I have started to keep a log of my time - its easily said but will do a honest job of it.

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By User deleted
24th Jul 2006 09:07

Are you sure?
Having read your posting a couple of times and noted a number of grammatical and spelling errors (prcatice? aborad?), I wonder whether "meticulous working" is really the problem here.

Perhaps the time has come for you to undertake an honest appraisal of your situation - gathering constructive feedback from the people for whom you work might be a good starting point.

To find a solution, you first have to identify the true source of the problem - I suspect that being meticulous is not it.

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