My life as an accountant

I got pictures working, so I'll include a picture every time I post! This is my bedroom at SDI -- it's really not too bad, and there's a desk to the right you can't see.

Over the past week I've been trying to get SDI's finances in order. I had at one point hoped that there were some records somewhere that listed how money was spent, but the only thing I ever found was a 2007 annual report which contained only estimates for 2004-2007. Sometime last week I decided that one way I could make an impact was to set SDI on a path to eventually being a real NGO. I also wanted to have written down exactly what my money was spent on, to see if it had really been misallocated.

So I talked with one of the so-called volunteers (she uses Turay's computer for homework, and in exchange runs errands for him) and she and Turay wrote down a bunch of things that had been purchased. I found a program called Mango, which is a simple financial system for NGOs based on Excel spreadsheets, and I put everything into there. Then I added the money that I had donated and started adding everything up.

The result: all the expenses actually were MORE than my donation. I talked to Sulaiman and he said that there was no money. No money! Since he has a job, I set it to $0 available by adding a "donation" of money to SDI in order to cover expenses. But all of my money was spent moving the office to a new location, prepaying rent for 6 months, and buying a bunch of crap they didn't need.

So I guess I have blackmail material here :-)

So I'm going through this, and start telling Turay that he misappropriated my funds. I showed him what he said the funds would go for -- among other things:

The fees that you pay goes to the project; it is better that it goes into the community and helps develop the area you will be working and put your name on the map of development actors rather than getting stuck in a western country.

I told him that 0% of my money went to helping the community -- it ALL went to overhead and administration! He sat there with a stupid grin, not really knowing what to say, because I was totally right. I wasn't even yelling, but I was firm. If nothing else, this experience is teaching me how to deal with people.

And his response? That my money IS going to help the community -- indirectly. His thought is that because SDI exists, that in itself helps the community because SDI will eventually help the community. I think he really believes this bullshit. I explained that no, my money went to OVERHEAD. 100% of my money went to overhead -- not helping the community. He seems to understand the difference between overhead and actually helping -- explaining that no NGO would spend more than 20% on overhead -- but he says that my money will eventually go to helping people, so it wasn't being really being spent on overhead.

God. I just told him that his job was to change the amount of funds available from $0 to something more than that. And that I wasn't really going to work all that hard helping SDI until there is funds -- because I was certainly not contributing anything else because my money had been misappropriated. So there are some bank accounts that have some SDI money in them, and I highly recommended that he withdraw some of that money and put some of it as SDI money and some of it as paying back the laptop that he was supposed to have money for. He said he would have that done before the weekend, so that's good news!

All in all, I guess I feel pretty good about it. I don't think SDI will really ever succeed because I think Sulaiman Turay is lazy, naive and not that bright. That and I'm blogging on a public forum about the org lol. But who knows -- maybe setting up accounting and forcing him to record expenses will make it more clear that you can't go spending money on stuff you don't need.

Oh, speaking of expense recording, I also setup a system where a person withdraws funds from the SDI pool of cash (well, when some actually exists), he or she then gets a voucher with which all the expenses from that money are recorded. Then when the money is depleted, the voucher goes into a pouch and another one is received. At the end of the month, all of the vouchers are added up and categorized into the Mango spreadsheet. It's lightweight, simple, and all these little expenses such as taxi fares and internet access can be recorded as they are spent. I'm pretty happy with it :-D

So, I think I'm about done with doing finances. It's now time to start figuring out what to do to actually help things around here. Without any money it's not too easy, but I can at least write up a proposal for when we do have money. And stuff around here is pretty cheap, so I should be able to get by. The important thing is that Turay understands that he needs to get this fixed, and I think I accomplished that.

I mean, it could be worse -- at least he's not a Nigerian scam artist.