The miracle of having friends in the know

Today I was reviewing my invoices from January through March to see what was still outstanding. My QuickBooks has a funky *ahem* feature that doesn’t allow me to manually record payments against invoices.  It only allows them to record properly if it figures it out – sort of like a precocious three-year-old who is convinced that he knows everything about the world and is often very wise, but just as often insists in a very knowing voice that the moon is made of green cheese.

Anyway, back in January, QuickBooks had made a couple of bad decisions about how to apply payments.  Either I didn’t notice or I couldn’t correct manually correct them – at this point I don’t remember.  Either way, payments were applied incorrectly or weren’t applied at all.  This morning I blithely went about correcting the situation.  You know, the equally precocious three-year-old little girl who insists that when she grows up she’s going to be the first female president who also opens a restaurant on Mars.

This evening, I went back into QuickBooks to do my monthly account balancing.  Which is when I noticed that something was wrong. Really wrong. My opening balance was way off.  “This can’t be,” I thought. “I balanced it out last month to the penny, how can it be wrong now?”

Thankfully I have a friend who is a bookkeeper/tax person/all around wizard with financial stuff that I don’t understand.  While I was on the phone with her tonight, I asked how my opening balance could possibly be so far off.  It took a few minutes of confused conversation (because a precocious three-year-old really can’t be reasoned with), but she eventually asked the question that cleared the whole thing up.  “Have you made any changes in how you applied things recently?”

AHA!  Until that moment, I’d forgotten this morning’s sojourn into overriding QuickBooks auto-application of payments.  Of course, the balance was off by exactly the same amount I had fiddled with earlier in the day.

Do you know how many hours I would have sat at my desk tearing my hair out over this?  Let’s just say that I would have pulled out several chunks of hair and whatever was left on my head would be a little grayer.

I try so hard to know everything and do everything on my own. I am so thankful that there are people to call in those moments when I realize that I can’t.

Now if someone could just have a conversation with my QuickBooks program and teach it to accept advice from others…