Gotten an email that reads,
Dear Prof Q,
I wanted to let you know that as I was preparing your financial statements for January, I realized that I made a mistake. When we sat down about 6 weeks ago and meticulously went over your grant accounting so that you could properly plan out how to spend down the end of your grant, I told you that you had $x00,000 left to spend on your grant. I know you were surprised that you had that much left on your grant, and then we scrambled to find good ways for you to spend it before your grant expires. The problem though, is that I didn't realize that the huge accounting mistake I made last August completely screwed this up, and so you really only have about 20% of that. Your grant is now $20,000 in overdraft. Sorry for the mistake.
Love,
your research admin person
This morning, I did.
Imagine me going fucking ballistic. Now, multiply that by 10. That was my day.
Dear Prof Q,
I wanted to let you know that as I was preparing your financial statements for January, I realized that I made a mistake. When we sat down about 6 weeks ago and meticulously went over your grant accounting so that you could properly plan out how to spend down the end of your grant, I told you that you had $x00,000 left to spend on your grant. I know you were surprised that you had that much left on your grant, and then we scrambled to find good ways for you to spend it before your grant expires. The problem though, is that I didn't realize that the huge accounting mistake I made last August completely screwed this up, and so you really only have about 20% of that. Your grant is now $20,000 in overdraft. Sorry for the mistake.
Love,
your research admin person
This morning, I did.
Imagine me going fucking ballistic. Now, multiply that by 10. That was my day.
Oh man... I know this sounds douchey, but she should be reported to her supervisor for this.
ReplyDeleteI have to tell you, I don't trust anyone with my math. I was screwed over like that by a couple of admins early on and I trust nobody with my budgets since then. Early on in my career I witnessed a couple of admin people do the math in front of me and it became clear they are not familiar with the distributive property of multiplication; one who was in SPO was arguing with me how it is incorrect to say in my budget justification that the money is for 66% of the full RA appointment (20 hrs a week, i.e. 50% of the default 40 hrs/wk) when it's actually 33% of the full-time appointment (40 hrs a week). Before you think it was an objection over wording, it was not -- she honestly thought 66% of 1/2 and 33% of the whole were not the exact same thing, which we cleared up after a couple of minutes.
Anyway, we have a reasonably good online grant management system and I simply do all the checking myself. Sure, there is an admin who has to do the final okay and generally takes care of the money being spent, but I don't do anything before double checking all the numbers myself.
I don't trust anyone with my math. I was screwed over like that by a couple of admins early on and I trust nobody with my budgets since then.
ReplyDeleteYes, this, totally. I once watched incredulously how our accounting person could not correctly calculate the series of salary increases for a grant post over 5 years (2% increase each year) and just added the 2% of the amount of year 1 to every year's amount. And when I explained that this is wrong and that 2% should be added cummulatively, they did not believe me and when finally convinced, did not know how to calculate it (because apparently noone else ever asked them to do it this way previously... *facepalm*). Since then, I always always keep track on all costs, spendings and double check any budget myself.
Something like this happened to a colleague of mine - it was the straw that broke the camel's back and that summer he quit. Took his grants with him, too. I'm in a social science discipline where large grants are not common and this colleague had a massive one.
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