It rained this morning. In fact, it began to pour yesterday evening, and thundered in the night, which means we were very lucky with the weather for the Tendring Show. Five or six hours earlier and it would have rained on our parade. I was quite pleased with today's rain, since the garden needed it, and I could get on with the beekeepers' accounts without FMOGT (Fear of Missing Out on Gardening Time).
Only giving coppers and five pence pieces in their floats to stalls that had price points in less than multiples of fifty pence was a good move, and saved me a lot of effort counting coppers this morning. I am paranoid about adding up money when it belongs to other people, and even without the brown shrapnel it took a while to count the contents of every box in turn, meticulously recording exactly what notes and coins were in each. Then after extracting my original floats, again noting down precisely what I'd taken out, I had to put some back for the proceeds of the last couple of raffles, which I'd delayed banking because they were such a useful cache of pound coins.
When I totted up what was there and filled in the bank paying in slip, it tallied with what should have been there, based on what I'd counted originally, and what I'd then added and subtracted. I took that as a good omen, and was able to reimburse the Systems Administrator for all the one and two pound coins I'd borrowed to help make up the floats.
The next step was to come at the sales from the other end, and work out what we theoretically sold, and what we owed to members for their honey and wax candles and slices of cake, based on the counts of opening and closing stock. In my far off youth, when I was training to be an accountant, we were taught that the stock take was one of the most vulnerable parts of an accounting record. If you want to throw the financial results of a company by a significant amount, misstating the balance sheet value of stock is about the easiest way to achieve a big shift in profits, up or down. I wanted our results to be as accurate as possible, and so it was with some irritation that I discovered that the theoretical sales did not match the cash ones.
Cash does not lie, though it can get lost, or stolen. I did not think that ours had, and thought on balance that one member's opening stock of honey for sale had probably been double counted. I only came to this conclusion after spending a long time going through my spread sheets, counting the bank notes yet again, and considering various ways in which I could have blundered, before narrowing my suspicions down to honey sales, and one particular form. The chap was out when I rang him to check roughly how much honey he'd brought to the show or taken home again, so the mystery persists for now. I hope that's the answer, because otherwise something has gone quite badly wrong. Last year we said that all forms listing goods for sale must be checked and signed off by one of the show organisers, but this year we didn't enforce the rule. I don't doubt our members' financial honesty, but I don't trust their ability to make it unambiguously clear on a piece of paper what they have brought along for sale. Actually, I think the form needs redesigning, since it isn't clear how to account for sample jars, which I suspect is the root cause of the problem in this case.
In the circumstances it's just as well that it went on raining in the afternoon.
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