Final Year in New Beginnings

I’m thinking this might be my final year with my current employer. I had my annual review a few weeks ago, and I did not get a good one. A part of it was certainly my fault. During the first half of last year, I dallied in taking on my annual objectives. Mid year, one of my main responsibilities became insanely complicated. I referring specifically to capital expenditures, or CapEx.

Without going too much into the accounting jargon, we spend large amounts of money on building and repairing our own equipment, which we refer to projects. I assign numbers to each of these projects in our information system. When invoices arrive for each of these projects, the people at the plants can post these invoices to their respective projects, and we have a means of seeing how much money has been spent on each project. Well, a plant in Sandersville doesn’t like to wait for projects to get approved. It’s always an emergency. The mill broke down, and they don’t have a project, they don’t want to expense it to their income statement and make their earnings seem meager, so they ask us (read: me) to if they can put it in a particular account, and we’ll reclass the amounts to the project when it’s the project number is finally approved. We accommodated their request, and they went hog wild spending money on projects that hadn’t been approved that weren’t for the emergency items. For instance, they started booking spending on a budgeted project for beautifying the plant for the purposes of impressing the corporate big wigs from Paris that hadn’t been approved. That’s not an emergency. They decided to repave the parking lot. That’s not an emergency. Some of it wasn’t legitimate Cap Ex spending. For example, vacuuming the dust out of the plant is an expense, not Cap Ex.

When the controller reclassified the amounts out of that clearing account and into their respective project numbers, we discovered a design flaw in our information system. Apparently, we can’t reclassify amounts to different project numbers in a single entry. For instance, if we tried to move $10k to project 1, $15k to project 2, and $15k to project 3, the journal entry will book the entire $40k to project 1. Of course, the system didn’t give any indication of that flaw until after the fact. Once that happened, huge chunks of my time and attention became diverted to straightening that mess out.

What aggravates me is that making that clearing account for the plant people to begin their premature spending was my managers idea. It’s like, when my managers tells me about what “we” are going to do during situations like the aforementioned one, I express my reservations, he tells me he understands, then we do what he wants to do anyway without modification.

Certainly, I bear some, probably most, of the responsibility of my lackluster performance, but I was cautioned that if we have a repeat of the previous year, my employment may be reviewed. A part of me wants to jump ship, but I’d like to leave my job on good terms. Also, I’m concerned I’ll find the same problems, or different problems of the same or worse degree, at another company. However, if I don’t do anything to change my situation, I suppose nothing will get better, will it?