crunching numbers, woah what a ditz is me

Part of my job as all-around slave *ehem* apprentice/editorial assistant, is to catch up on the royalty statements of all the Tahanan Authors and Illustrators to which they are due. I started in April and I'm still not done.

The task involved digging up files and recreating entire financial statements. Which called upon my abilities as a researcher more than an accountant *shudder, accountant* which was pretty satisfying. Except when I realized, after printing out a lovely spreadsheet, that whole months were still unaccounted for. And back to the files it was. Dig, tally, compute. Ok na sana. Then I realized that we'd had price increases within those years and if the figures were based on percentages...shet. So hanap hanap hanap among the sales reports for when each price increase seemd to take effect. Finally I think that I have a pretty accurate spreadsheet with everything I need. Sigh.

So to celebrate I took a 2month-long vacation from this task.

I hate Maths. I know that it's more a skill than some inborn talent that you either have or you don't. But numbers make me dizzy. And no matter how careful I am, I always seem to get something wrong. (It's a good thing the accountant is double-checking these reports when I'm done.) So really, I reasoned that the editing and the marketing and the book projects were really much more important than these royalty statements. (In case you are a Tahanan author/illustrator, don't get huffy, no one is getting paid because no one's printrun/advances have reached that point yet. Smile!)

But keeping these reports up to date is part of what we signed in the contracts. And we owe it to the talents we've worked with. So I'll be finished by July if it kills me. I promise. : (