My position is unique. Most people probably think administrative assistant duties are all pretty much the same across the board. This may be true to a point, but only in the most general of definitions. For the most part, all admins manage phone calls, type, file, and requisition supplies. Unless you work for a government—or pseudo-government, in my case—agency. Even within our agency of more than 1500 employees, the admin pool is diverse in their responsibilities, and as we focus more closely on specific work location those duties and skills become even more specified.
One of my many duties is creating budget variance reports. My particular department (section) has 3 units consisting of 10 teams total. Every month for the past 3 or 4 years I’ve entered data into our budget reporting system verifying all monies spent; not just how much, but for what purpose. For the first three quarters of the fiscal year, I just put general notes listing the vendor and amount spent in each category (there are anywhere from 10 to 30 categories per unit/team). The final quarter of the year I go into more detail, projecting whether or not a unit or team will be within range (+/- 5%), over budget, or under budget along with vendor information and amount spent. This is not a new endeavor for me. Once I complete the reports, I use the data to populate (manually) a spreadsheet that I use to visually track every dollar in and out per team and unit in every category. This is for my own information and helps me to see exactly where our budget dollars are being spent. It’s a complicated spreadsheet and there are a great number of calculations.
/boring bits
I have separate tabs for section, units, teams, and categories. Each of these tabs has a separate tab with bar charts graphing the information in a budgeted amount vs amount spent. These graphs are fed from the data tabs. The data tabs contain overall monthly expenditures, percent over/under budget per team and/or category, and even sparklines showing when during the course of the year funds were spent.
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I spent a lot of time initially setting this spreadsheet up and getting it to work the way I wanted it to.
As I mentioned in a previous post, my boss vacated her position and I, by default, was given the majority of her tasks and duties. Granted, some of the tasks and duties I’ve been performing for years so there were no major changes there.
Preparing these reports literally takes hours, or for the final quarter reports, days. It’s a lot of work, but it’s also something that I thoroughly enjoy doing. To break this down into sheer numbers, every month I create 14 team reports and 3 unit reports. I know that one of our more senior analysts–not even in my department—does not like the way I do my first three quarters; she doesn’t understand that my customers—the team and unit managers reading the reports–like the format because it tells them where their money is actually being spent and is not cluttered with over/under budget information and calculations unnecessary until the final quarter of the fiscal year. That’s when they need more detail, not early in the year when that information is just clutter.
The analyst that doesn’t like my formatting is responsible for compiling the section level report. In a perfect world, she would base her report on what I’ve created, but instead she works the other way around—top down rather than bottom up, which means she is recreating the wheel. I’ve already done all the grunt work, she just needs to expand on it and fill in any areas that I didn’t cover or where definitions and explanations were insufficient. Essentially, that should make her job easier.
Again, I’ve been doing these reports for years. So why is that the first month since my boss left—technically second, but due to technical issues we didn’t complete reports last month—this other analyst suddenly feels like she needs to step in and assist? I know I shouldn’t feel threatened and it’s not really a threat that I feel, it’s more like an encroachment or distrust. I feel like she doesn’t trust me to do it despite that fact that I’ve been doing it for years. Just over the past two months she felt the need to educate me on another aspect of my job that I’ve been doing for years without incident. It’s frustrating and I’m honestly too busy doing my job to worry about changing the way she thinks I should do it.
In all honest, I don’t think she realizes that I’m the one that’s been doing these things—variance reporting and ordering operating equipment—for several years.