Cheryl Entry #19

Finance-related problems

Ram and I did up the financial statements for January after spending two weeks trying to balance our balance sheets.

Sales not tallying

For all the events from November till now, we had recorded our sales for each event with members on shift recording it down. When it gets busy at our booths sometimes we would miss out a few sales here and there which always makes me feel like I'm figuring out a puzzle whenever our cash doesn't tally with the sales recorded.

When we started accepting cashless payments it got even worse because then we had to keep track of how much online sales we made. Since the account is under Ram's name, most of the time this leads to 3am Skypes when we can't solve it individually. January also had 3 events which made mistakes even harder to spot

Taobao purchases

The most annoying part of everything is still Taobao. Everything is denominated in yuan so when we convert it back to SGD it leaves us with very ugly decimals that keeps building up with every purchase we made. The first payment includes the cost of goods as well as the domestic shipping while the second payment is includes delivery from the China warehouse back to Singapore. This means we had to calculate the total shipping costs by ourselves (by adding the first and second delivery costs).

As if that wasn't bad enough, we buy 100-300 figurines in our purchases. After the first purchase where we bought over 300 figurines we found out that the unit cost of each figurine is $0.36. We decided to standardize this unit cost for subsequent purchases (such that the total cost of figurines divided by the quantity is $0.36).

It required a lot of calculation and we threw it to Shun Kai to do it.

Missing receipts

Just to be on the safe side, we always keep a physical proof of our purchases which makes it easier for Ram to do the reimbursements when we get supplies separately. We have a folder full of receipts and maybe it's a very traditional and low-tech way to keep track of our spending, but it helped us out a lot whenever we tried to figure out what was missing in our expense list. Most of the time what we missed out were Grab fees so eventually Ram just tore a slip of paper and wrote 'Grab-$x' and dumped it to the folder full of receipts each month.

Changing costs

Initially we had no problems because we stuck to Pick-A-Plant which charged us a flat $1.20 for every succulent we bought, cactus included. After January when they stopped having new shipments (they still have no new shipments till now), they changed their pricing as well- $1.30 for cactus and $1.20 for other succulents. Then we started to get from Hua Hng and Pioneer Garden where the cost increased to $2.50 per succulent.

All of these problems added up which took us some time, a lot of discussion and massive amounts of patience to correct, but we got there. Congratz to Ram and I!!