Tech-Challenged Boss Reconciling Online Purchases

[Signstein]

I'm not sure if this is more of a technology thing or a "balancing the checkbook" thing, but my boss has an absolute miserable time reconciling my online purchases each month because some vendors like Amazon and Lowes will charge per item versus charging for the entire order. So when I submit a receipt for an Amazon purchase totaling $47, he sees charges for $13, $7, $21, $6, etc. It totally confuses him - he keeps asking me for receipts that I've already given him. And what seems obvious to me (those small charges all add up to $47) is completely alien to him and he doesn't know why they don't make just one charge.
I guess it's also frustrating because he doesn't know how to search his email? I mean, how can he not find the receipts - when he asks me for the second and third time I'm just forwarding him the exact same emails each time. It's maddening.
Added also is the fact that he is oblivious to print previews and somehow always manages to just print the first page of a doc - and then asks me why it doesn't list the entire order...
So now I guess I can no longer order from some places? Or only purchase one item per order? That's the only way I can think to have the charges "match". The added bonus is that a single-item order should only take up one page to print!
Have any of you guys ever encountered this? Any ideas or suggestions on how to work around it? Or tips for technology / recordkeeping assistance?

 

[Johnny Best]

Yea, let him order things.

 

[garyroy]

Fire him or demote him.

 

[White Haus]

Hire a bookkeeper that can do these things in a tenth of the time?

Doesn't sound like he's the right guy for that kind of work, or for using computers in general for that matter.

 

[JBurton]

+1 for bookkeeper.
At the very least, print your receipts into pdf's and put them on a shared drive for him. Put them in a folder named 'receipts' and make a shortcut on his desktop for him.
I too know the pain of my elders not understanding how to search emails. I get a request every other week for a job that was emailed to me 5 years ago, from the requester...

 

[Stacey K]

Sounds like an idiot. Either get with the times or go out of business. Perhaps he's purposely trying to "fight the system".

 

[gnubler]

Fire him or demote him.

Yes. Sometimes that's the best choice. He may have a legitimate learning disability or something wrong upstairs. I know someone like that...
Is he otherwise a nice person or good boss? Find a way to have him not do that then.

This reminds me of my first job in a commercial print shop. Owner was totally nice and treated everyone well. The problem was he always wanted to "help" in production. Maybe trying to show that doing our jobs wasn't beneath him? Anyway, he f'd up so many jobs, leading to reprints or making things take longer. We resorted to involving him as little as possible. If we had a problem with something we'd just figure it out and keep him out of it.

 

[Signstein]

Yes, he's a good boss otherwise. Good with managing people, doesn't get in the way but helps when needed, and has 30+ years of institutional knowledge about this place. It's more the admin part that he sucks at.
JBurton - I like the idea of a shared folder for receipts. That eliminates the entire re-emailing routine. I just don't know why it's such a big deal if an online order gets split into multiple parts. Amazon vans are all over this place every day - the entire company is ordering from Amazon without issue. I'm wondering now if I need to contact bookkeeping, but I don't want to throw my boss under the bus. Ugh...

 

[JBurton]

I'm wondering now if I need to contact bookkeeping, but I don't want to throw my boss under the bus. Ugh...

Maybe holler at your boss first, tell him you're thinking you two are missing something on making this a smooth process, and find out what bookkeeping is doing to handle this. Maybe he's pulling stuff 'into' jobs as it's ordered instead of into an inventory pool, which is dispersed into jobs. All kinds of different ways of doing things leads to somebody inevitably banging their head against a bad situation thinking its normal.

 

[pro-UP]

You can print and download invoices of total orders. If you view the order, you can select invoice. This will show the individual charges and then a lumpsum total.

 

[FireSprint.com]

Some of the online vendors are a real pain to order from for this reason. It's been an issue around here as well.

Sure if you have one amazon transaction a month and all the little transactions add up to the total, then that's easy enough.

BUT, if you order from amazon multiple times a week, like we do, it gets to be quite challenging to figure out where the $6.42 should be applied. The small charges don't all bill on the same day, and they may even be a couple of weeks apart if you ordered something that took a while to ship.

Not defending a technology inept boss that needs to hire a bookkeper, but it can be harder that it seems...

Maybe start a Google Sheet of all the small purchases with one line and one amount per item, and the order/number total in the column.

Or yes, just order one item at a time.

 

[Notarealsignguy]

Fill out an expense report, itemize it, give it a G/L code, staple the receipt to it and turn it in. That's what I had to do in any job that I worked at.
In defense of your boss, it's a PITA going back trying to figure out employee purchases and he probably has better things to do then digging through emails trying to make sense of it all. This is one of the many reasons that companies use PO's.

 

[Signstein]

We spoke a bit more about this today and he's pretty defensive about it. He seems certain that I'm doing something wrong and causing these orders to be split into separate orders. Whatever. He's older and set in his ways (which is perfectly fine) so I'm not going to put up too much of a fight. You guys have given me some good ideas so thank you. The extra time I spend now saving receipts and keeping a list will offset all the time I was spending emailing and printing stuff for him. I'll take that as a win.

 

[JBurton]

Have you tried an amazon for business account? I haven't but I could see the ability to attach PO's to an invoice as one of it's core functions. But it probably just helps you reorder hand sanitizer faster!

 

[DL Signs]

Sounds like he's "old school", thinking how if you go to a store, buy 5 items, you get one receipt, because it all came from the same store.
Might be hard for him to comprehend that when you buy from a marketplace like Amazon, when you order 5 items, it's kind of like going to 5 different stores. While the bill is processed in one transaction by Amazon, it may come from 5 sellers, hence 5 different purchases, 5 different orders, 5 different receipts. You need to explain the concept to him, how Amazon itself doesn't really sell anything direct like a store that handles multiple brands and products, they just process orders for multiple stores, sellers, & manufacturers, and each item can end up being a separate purchase, even if all were ordered/ purchased at the same time.

 

[Signstein]

Yeah, he's definitely old school. And Notareal is absolutely right too - he's the boss so he shouldn't have to hunt for the info he needs. It should be easy for him and hard for me.

 

[Humble PM]

Just tell me that the boss doesn't look at figures on screen, write them down in a notebook, add them up with a desk calculator, write them down, then type them in on a keyboard without a number pad.

If they do, please keep them, because they are our boss, and ctl-c ctl-v is voodoo, witch craft, and didn't work when they tried it 17 years ago, so they're not going to do it now. (our book-keeper was taken into hospital a few weeks back, and we're making payments, but, by god, it is tortuous to watch.)

/rant

 

[CanuckSigns]

We use a service called Dext (used to be called receipt bank) where you can take a photo of a receipt in the app, or email your receipts to a designated email address and the system will automatically extract the data and push the information to QuickBooks, which will automatically reconsile it with your credit card or bank account from the live feed it pulls. It also uploads a pdf of the invoice to QuickBooks and attaches it to the entry so you can view the invoice anytime you need. It's around $25 a month and honestly saves us hours each week!