Not only does this put more stress on the store managers who have had their staff cut down to a skeleton but, home office employees have been told to push things through that normally we would have a more detailed discussion with the store before doing anything. For someone that works in the finance department, it makes our work that much more stressful because of a smaller audit trail. Follett hired new external auditors this past spring/summer; generally this means additional work for finance teams because the auditors need to understand our processes, most of which are written procedures. By not having detailed discussions (building the audit trail) with stores prior to making a financial entry/adjustment and going around those written procedures, the auditors will question our decision making much more than usual. In turn, this can make the home office employees look like shmucks because of the possibility of not having all information required by a written accounting procedure.
I get that the first thing that sr mgmt looks at is bottom line; but, i think they need to look at the operational inefficiencies that plague the company as opposed to employee expense only. There are points in my work were they could be up to 4 people looking at the same thing. That makes no sense; 3 of those 4 people do not directly work with the store and there is no communication between them and the direct contact for the store (a heads up would be nice). There are other cases of financial entries being made without the store or myself knowing about it, then i have to take the time to research on my end because the store manager does not understand where the adjustment came from. Sometimes it takes me 5 minutes, sometimes a few hours. This takes me away from assisting other stores or doing other work. Or there are times where i can make a financial entry but, i have to hand it off to someone else because there specific job is making those types of adjustments; or i have to check with someone else before making an entry because someone else might already be working on that issue. it makes absolutely no sense; it is about as efficient as the US government at this point.