Four Days of Accounting

I am, to put it mildly, arithmetically-challenged. Failed four straight semesters of math during junior high, partly because I was just plain lazy and never did the homework, but the underlying reason for that was that it was just so damn hard that, given my recent discovery of acting, there were other things I found much more interesting. (And by the way, summer school in Florida in the late 1970s was a joke--the math classes were so simple that they in no way made up for what I hadn't learned during the normal school year. I was able to advance from one grade to another on time, but I learned nothing.)

The company I run with Marc Rosenbush, Zenmovie LLC, exists in part to oversee the distribution of Zen Noir both theatrically and on DVD. (The theatrical run just officially ended in Chicago last week, by the way--so if you want to see it, DVD is now your only option, unless you live in New York City. And hey, the DVD just happens to be for sale right here! Isn't that incredibly convenient?) One of my functions within the company, for the moment, is the bookkeeping. Once we've made a little more progress toward recoupment, we'll hire someone who actually understands what they're doing to keep the books. But until then, it's just me and Marc, working our way through stuff a little at a time.

Bear in mind, though: math and I are not on speaking terms. With words, I can pretty do what I want. They are concrete yet pliable, their structures and possibilities perfectly clear in my mind. But numbers, which are supposedly these solid, dependable things--the number 2 always means the same thing no matter what its context--still, somehow, slip and slide from my grasp. They're liquid, and any time I try to work my way through a formula, it always dances away from me. Programs like Excel and QuickBooks help a lot, but it's still always Garbage In Garbage Out, and I am, unfortunately, all too capable of inputting an awful lot of garbage.

Nonetheless, on a couple occasions we've been able to get some help. Our friend Kellie over at the Spiritual Cinema Circle is an accounting whiz, and on Sunday, Marc and I drove up to her home and spent a few hours discovering how everything we'd done had been wrong. She showed up how we really needed to set up our accounting, then Marc and I met up again several times this week and executed her changes--a process that is, as of this morning, still not quite finished, but it's almost there.

Plenty of things I still don't fully understand. How is a Cost of Goods Sold category different from a normal Expense? Dunno. What exactly constitutes a Selling Expense and what an Operating Expense? I sorta-kinda understand this one, but there are still plenty of entries that seem to straddle both possibilities. But the nice thing is that after Kellie's help, I don't necessarily have to understand everything--I can just do again what we did before, in exactly the same way, and it should all work out.

Of course, I imagine that back in junior high I kept thinking something like "it should all work out" too, and we saw how that went.