Accounting

In 2012, the staff of the Accounting Department managed to its goals like a well-oiled machine. This team has worked together now for several years, and this year the team worked hard to achieve more depth and a better understanding of one another’s working styles. Workloads were heavy but regular meetings enabled us to be effective in coordinating our efforts.

The department’s technologies were stable and largely met the demands placed upon them. However, we did finally outgrow our payroll vendor, so we converted to a new system and vendor without much fanfare. This conversion was well-researched, planned, and executed by our Payroll Manager.

Cash Flow forecasting for the organization remains critically important and has been managed extraordinarily well. The Budget Committee’s processes remained consistent and timely. However, we did see a fairly large magnitude of late spending approvals this year, making it challenging to manage cash flow. Hopefully we can get better control of these in 2013.

2012 brought with it some greater demands on our Account Payable operations. To take on some of the burden, we found yet another amazing Burner to assist us on a temporary basis. Our timely and accurate month-end close process continues to deliver information that is invaluable for organizational decision making.

Once again in 2012, the organization was the primary beneficiary of better hiring and pay processing than we have experienced in the past. However, increased volumes of temporary labor and a tighter timeline for data entry led to an untenable workload for accounting personnel. We are committed us to find better processes to address these issues for 2013.

We have found some traction with our existing systems for the Purchase Order process. However, this could also use some attention in 2013. We are looking into purchasing a Fixed Asset Management software program in 2013. Also, some attention needs to be given to an Inventory system for small tools and equipment. It’s our hope that this software could do both!

In summary, 2012 was another successful year for the accounting department. In our humble opinion, the accounting staff at Burning Man are rock stars!

Submitted by,
Doug Roberts