Getting to Know the Accounting Department
Val Smith, Darcy Zera, Christin Lindenmeyer, Deb Harmon, Shirley Reif, Emily Smith & Carol Milens
Seven dedicated individuals call our accounting department home at Crest Foods. While most of us do anything we can to avoid paying the bills at home, these people do it every day for a living. Imagine having well over 650 vendors that could receive a payment from Crest with over 100 different checks going out in any given week. Many of these checks represent some pretty substantial payments…for example our typical electric bill is around $80,000 a month. The many holders of Crest credit cards generate over 8,000 individual charges annually. We also collect payments from over 9,000 invoices that are sent to our customers over the course of the year. All of this activity and more is documented in what is called the general ledger which is the happy home to all finan- cial transactions across Crest Foods – payroll, inventory, manufacturing, purchasing, invoicing, etc. Each year over 500,000 summary data records get entered into our general ledger with hundreds of thousands of more detail records needed to support those entries. If it goes into the computer system, it eventually ends up in accounting where it is summarized, analyzed, scrutinized, validated, graphed, allocated and eventually spit back out on a timely basis in the form of 250 different financial statements. If the information on those statements is positive, account- ing gets a pat on the back and an occasional good job comment. If the information is negative, they get a general scowl and many requests to document exactly what went wrong. Accounting also wears a number of other hats at Crest just to make sure they don’t get bored with just working on the general ledger. They also set budgets, handle the procurement of all of our various forms of insurance, complete government census reports, manage corporate taxes, have involvement with managing customer contracts and file tax returns. Because they are involved with so many aspects of our operation, they also are utilized in large company wide initiatives that require skills in the Excel programming area that are beyond the rest of us. Oh yeah, they have led the push to being paperless and smash the stereotype of accountants being “bean coun- ters” that are locked away and out of site in a back office somewhere. We are proud to have such a talented and dedicated group working in our accounting department.
2 Crest Ink April, May & June 2017
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