Becoming a Bookkeeper

 When I was working at Cherry Tree Aviation, my desk was in the center of everything that happened. Everyone who came in and out went by my desk. Most people (both employees and customers) hung out in the central lobby area because that was where the coffee machine and the cigarette machine were. One of the people that I got to know while working there was Peter (not his real name), who owned a plane that he hangared with Cherry Tree Aviation and went flying frequently during the work week (a perk of owning his own business). He was a very jovial fellow, like to joke and tell stories, liked by everyone.

When Peter learned that Cherry Tree was closing down and I was losing a job, he asked me if I wanted to come work for him at his small manufacturing company. He had a very small office with two people, a bookkeeper and an accountant. The bookkeeper handled all the accounts receivable and the order desk, while the accountant handled the accounts payable, and all the accounting issues like payroll and taxes. The bookkeeper was a young woman my age who was married and expecting her first child and planning to quit work about a month before her due date, which was coming up soon and he hadn't found a suitable replacement. Like John Pritchard, Peter had decided that I was probably capable of learning the job even if I didn't have formal office or bookkeeping training. 

Two weeks later I started work at Peter Works (not its real name). Most of the building space was taken up by the machine shop were their product, car and motorcycle headers, were fabricated by skilled machinists (like my father). At the very front of the building were two offices, the smaller of which was where the bookkeeper and accountant worked, and a slightly larger inner office that was Peter and his partner's. Peter was the idea guy, the one who talked to customer, made deals and designed the headers. His partner was an older, gruff fellow who was the one who turned the ideas into reality, he had engineering and machinist training and spent most of his time in the machine shop supervising and guiding the half dozen young men who fabricated the headers. 

For those who don't know headers are a fancy exhaust system (generally for cars pre-1980, but also for motorcycles) that help exhaust flow away from the engine and improve engine performance (increased horsepower and torque), so important for people who raced stockcars or motorcycles. Customers ranged from individuals, to small car and bike shops, to large distributers like JC Whitney in Chicago that had a huge catalog business of all kinds of car and motorcycle parts. [The image is of a set of headers designed for a small block engine Chevy car 1955 to 1957). Header design is specific to a car make and type, as the pipes must fit into tight spaces in an engine. 

It turned out that the bookkeeping was the easiest part of the job to learn. I was taught how to do double entry bookkeeping in paper ledgers and how to make daily reports to the bank on income and outflow of money. The hardest part of the job was working the order desk. I had a detailed catalog to refer to, but still needed to learn a lot of specifics about particular car makes and designs. It was necessary to know the exact size of an engine in cubic centimeters (ccs), and whether the engine had any additional modifications. If I didn't know an answer I had to track down one of the bosses and ask, but unlike the young woman I was replacing, I started taking notes, so that I would only ever have to ask a particular question one time.

I liked both parts of the job. I found working with numbers and details to be calming. Even the part where at the end of the day everything had to total up with no more than 1 penny difference was enjoyable. On the rare days that I had made a mistake the hunt for the missing  money to correct the error was challenging and fun. Talking with customers on the phone was also fun, most of the time. There was always some guy somewhere who didn't want to talk to a "girl" about technical stuff and would insist that I get him a man to talk to. Usually when that happened I would have Bob the accountant (often the only other person in the office at the time) take the phone. Bob was a good man, and a great accountant, but he knew nothing at all about cars or headers. Usually after the guy talk fruitlessly to Bob for a while, he'd be willing to do business with me, because I generally knew what I was talking about. 

Bob was an interesting character. He was a high functioning alcoholic, something everyone knew. But twice in the five months I worked there, he did not show up for work for two or three days in a row. The bosses would say "oh, Bob's gone on another bender," and nothing was ever said to him when he would show up again, sober and ready to work.

I particularly liked dealing with the small car and bike shops that would buy directly from the company. Over the months I developed friendly, bantering relationships with several of the men who ran those shops. One in particular I remember was a custom bike shop in Ohio. They ordered headers almost weekly and the owner was a funny and pleasant guy with an amazing voice. 

In addition to the headers we also sold t-shirts and bumper stickers with the company logo. Requests for those often came in the mail from teens and adults with five dollar bills for the t-shirts. It was my job to select the right size shirt, package it and mail it out to the client. 

There were only two problems I had working at Peter Works. The first I simply decided to ignore (and not tell my father about). The shop was not unionized, and about two months after I began to work there the International Machinists decided to try to unionize it. They began picketing the building during working hours. Now I was raised in a union family, and my dad was a member of the International Machinists, and I was brought up never to cross a picket line. It made me very uncomfortable (and as I said I couldn't tell my father about it) but I decided that I wanted to keep the job, so kept coming to work despite the pickets.  Part of my argument to myself was that Peter gave all the machinists raises, so that their wages were actually above union scale to keep them from organizing, and none of the workers were interested in foregoing those higher wages to sign a union card. Of course, Peter did not give out benefits like health care or retirement, but most younger workers didn't have the foresight to realize how important those were. The whole situation made Bob and me grumble, because our pay (mine was only $2 an hour) did not change, because at that time there were no unions for office workers to join. 

The UPS drivers who picked up our shipments also would not cross a picket line, but the pickets would leave as soon as the workers did at 4:30 PM, and the truck drivers were willing to make us their last call of the day, and show up after the pickets and the workers (including me and Bob) were gone. This arrangement with the truck drivers unfortunately made it easier for the second problem to arise. 

Small manufacturing companies without large capital investment often face a problem. To sell a product you have to make it, and to make it you need to buy materials (in the case of headers this is mostly steel), and pay wages of workers. This is acerbated by the fact that it often takes a long time, weeks if not months for small companies to get payment from their customers. To solve this problem banks would offer accounts receivable loan funding. Accounts receivable funding still exists, often from on-line lenders as well as established banks. How it works is that when a small manufacturing company ships product to a buyer, the bank will loan them about 80% to 90% of the value of that as yet unpaid shipped invoice. This means that for every item you ship out your door, you get money the next day from the bank to pay for new materials and current wages while you wait for your customer to pay you. When the customer does pay you, you pay back the bank for the loan plus small interest, and pocket the remainder (so less than 20% to 10% of payments coming in stay with the company, and the bank gets what they loaned out plus interest. This was why at the end of every business day, I had to send Peter Works' bank a report, the report had to include: bookkeeping summary for the day, a photocopy of all the invoices for products shipped out that day, and every few weeks a check for the money owed the bank. 

That year, 1974 was in the middle of a recession (the recession lasted 1973 through 1975) and it was made much worse by the Arab Oil Embargo that began in November 1973. Gasoline was not just much more expensive than it had been, it was also scarce. I had given up driving a car to work altogether in 1974 because in California one could only get gas every other day (depending upon whether your license plate ended with an even or an odd number), and waiting in a gas line could take hours that I did  not have. I bought a really nice 10 gear bike, a Peugeot, and rode the bike to work along the San Francisco bay. It was a glorious way to commute. But the difficulty in getting fuel and the overall recession hit companies like Peter Works heavily because they provided parts for vehicles that used oil products. 

Because of the International Machinists picket line in front of the factory, all our product was shipped out after I and all the other workers other than the owners had left. As a result rather than reporting shipping invoices the day they went out, I would find a stack on my desk in the morning when I came in, enter them into the books, copy them and add them to that days bank report. It was in my fourth month there that I slowly realized what was happening, and it took a phone call from one of our largest customers, a large retailer that carried Peter Works headers in their catalog. The call was a complaint about not having received a shipment of headers that had been ordered. I found that confusing, because I had recorded and reported invoices for those products, with shipping labels to them in the previous weeks. 

It took me a while to put the pieces together, but what was happening, was that after hours when only the owners were there, they were creating fake invoices and shipping labels for products that did not exist (they didn't exist because they didn't have enough money for the materials to make them). Through me they were sending false information to the bank and getting funding for product that did not exist yet in hopes of getting enough funding to actually create the product and ship it before the deception was discovered. I began to realize that I had been asked to lie to customers about their orders being produced and when they would be shipped, when there was little certainty of that happening. 

The knowledge of the deception and cheating took a great toll on me. I did not like having been used as part of this scam. While I did not report what was happening to anyone outside the company, I did immediately proffer two weeks notice. Those last two weeks there were the most uncomfortable working situation I think I've ever had. 

I don't know what the consequences, if any, to the company and its owners were. I do know that the company still exists today, located in a different city, under the same name, still making headers, which is why I have changed the name of the owner and the company. It was my first real brush with the corruption that exists in business, and a major factor in why I have come to distrust those who make large amounts of money through business. I have come to know many honest small business owners over the years. None of them because rich from their businesses. I tend to be suspicious of those who do.