Work Frustration

I am the commission accountant for an insurance brokerage firm in Portland. With that comes a lot of stress and frustration, but for the most part I enjoy it. I know that what I do is important for the company.

Well..yesterday was just one of those days that I HATE my job.

I work on commission statements all day long. Our company receives statements from health insurance carriers (HealthNet, Regence, Kaiser, LifeWise, Providence...etc.) that contain client payment information; such as, name, policy number, agent who represented them and therefore gets commission off the client, client's plan name, premium, and percentage of commission of the premium that needs to go to the correct broker for that client sale. There are around 50 different agents that are affiliated with our company.

Once I get the statements, I have to enter this information into a complicated computer program called Captiva. It is supposed to be the latest and greatest accounting program for businesses like ours. But it is new..and there are some glitches in it that we need either fix or just get used to. Because of the complicated program...one statement can take me 6-8 hours to enter and reconcile, some take me 1-2...just depends. Our company receives well over 40 statements a month. All the statements that are received in the beginning of the month need to be completely entered into the program by the end of that same month.

Well, yesterday our company's main accountant told me that Captiva is printing out the reports incorrectly, so the total of the statements aren't reconciling to the total amount of the commission check received for that statement. She gave be 5 statements back....to redo. That's over 10 hours of work, based on the certain statements she gave back.

I about died. It's not that I'm entering information in incorrectly because all of my statements reconciled perfectly. I've never given an incorrect statement to our accountant. The only thing I can think of is the actual program is messing up...or the person that took over my position while I was in India for a few weeks did something unintentionally that messed up its calculations. The point is...I have to go back and redo work that I know is correct and I just can't figure out why it's not working.

I'm off to go do some number crunching!