FOCUS!

Durty should appreciate this blog.

So I received a powerful object lesson on why you never "take your eye off the ball" yesterday.  Yesterday was Business Day One at my company which means it's your last chance to make sure all of your numbers are correct for month end.  It was also Legal Day One, or the first day that Bank of America officially owned LaSalle Bank.  There were plenty of meetings held to welcome us into the family and all that good stuff.

So what did I do for most of the day yesterday?  Well, Rockcrawler (our clan Godfather/Overlord) sen me an invite to Facebook, and I just got carried away with it.  I found one person I have not seen since 3rd grade, another couple that I have not spoken to since high school and it was overall a VERY cool experience.  Sort of like Classmates.com but without them bugging you for money every five seconds.

Uhm, just one problem, though - remember what day I said it was?  Well at about 4:45 my conscience started ringing that I hadn't checked any of my numbers.  Thank God for consciences.  I had made a $5M over accrual in one of my lines of business, and I had 15 minutes to find someone to approve a journal entry.  I ran to my boss' office - not there.  Oh... Crap.  Ran and found his two colleagues - both agreed to hang around until the journal entry was approved.

In hindsight, it was a really careless and stupid mistake.  The previous month I had made a year to date reversal and then accrual.  But then I had to go back and make a small correction to the accrual and in that correction I also included a rather large second reversal.  When I did my year to date reversal this month, I lumped together the opposite of the accrual (my reversal), the correction to the accrual (in reverse, again) and I also reversed the large reversal ($5M) - in effect, re-accruing it.  I knew right away when I looked at my reconciliation that it was WAY off, but it took me a few minutes to figure out how and why I had made the mistake.

So lesson learned - even when it feels like a slacker day, cover your back side before you go out to play :)