• Life Is a Highway by Tom Cochrane

I received 5555 comments, this must be a sign.  In Thai or Lao language, a 5 is pronounced as Ha, and many use 5555 as the sound of their LOL or laugh out loud, and I’ve seen this used by mostly Thai people.

When I saw this 5555 comments on my blog, this must reflect on the conversation that I recently had with the auditor, but I didn’t see the humor in it.  There is more than one way of doing things when it comes to reconciling your bank account, and this I was told that there is only one way, the correct way, and it is the GAAP way. I looked at him in disbelief, he must have thought that I didn’t understand the term that he used, “GAAP”, he must have thought that I was thinking about the GAP clothing store.

The GAAP way? I thought to myself, what? you got to be kidding me, I don’t have time to think about the General Accepting Accounting Principle when ‘Time’ is something that I have very little of these days, as long as the bank balance reconcile to the book balance at the end of the month, that’s all it matters to us here.

Of course I didn’t say any of this. What I said was, we have different people doing different things, and it is very important for us to reconcile to catch any errors right away, and at the time the bank reconciliation was done, there’s not enough information to make it GAAP, but I can redo it and make it GAAP for you, and the balance would still be the same, here I work backward to find the discrepancy between the book and bank.

He gave me that look, “you got to be kidding me.” I stared back at him and think, “I kid you not.”

I think for some, the language that he used can be very intimidating, it is not something that you say to people everyday, most would not know what he is talking about and I’m sure we all have different ways of reconciling our bank statement. I’m glad that I don’t have to show him how I reconcile my personal bank statement, I might be one of those accountants that don’t have an ending balance for their checkbook, my philosophy, if you’ve money in there then you shouldn’t have to worry.

My point, there is more than one way of doing things and I always try to find the fastest and most efficient way of doing it.  The presentation might not be acceptable by some profession, but it is only the presentation, the end result is the same.  And in this case, I was able to convince him that my way also gives him the same result.