#accountingnerd

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Full Speed Ahead

Prior to my assignment with WRC I joined a workshop put on by AfID www.afid.org.uk/workshops regarding what it’s like to volunteer your accounting and finance skills. We cover a number of incredibly helpful topics such as general cultural differences, a sample day in the life of a volunteer, “what if” scenarios, down to specific cultural differences in planning your day and the passage of time (meeting planning, managing your own expectations of how much you will achieve, etc). Some of the case studies that we work through in the workshop use examples of situations where a day does not go according to plan because of internet outages, unexpected government office closures, road closures, meetings being cancelled, someone just not showing up to a planned meeting, etc. There aren’t wrong or right, they are just examples to set expectations as it can help reduce frustrations when you go on assignment and are too rigid with your time management expectations.

One of those “unexpected interruptions in your day” examples happened recently at WRC but I could not have asked for a better “interruption”. While I had planned to sit down with Bunnak, the finance and accounting officer I’m working closely with on a number of our goals, instead I was invited to join the ladies of WRC in an all day workshop with one of their donor representatives. It was an amazing day working with one of the donors, hearing what’s important to them in how they choose to fund projects and their advice on methods to build a plan around their projects. More importantly, I was able to experience the ladies of WRC building on their existing plan for their child care program, refining their mission and next steps to provide a fun and affordable child care solution in a trusted environment to empower families to build their better future. As a partner with the finance and accounting team, it was very insightful to me to learn the program development process which ultimately becomes a capital and operational budget plan which needs funding and this is executed and evaluated.

Back to one of my earlier blog posts about motivations and white saviorism: it can be too easy to speak up with an opinion when it isn’t our place to offer one. I have to recognise the privileges that I have and that some people may ask for my opinion, even when I’m not qualified to give one. This workshop was a good lesson to me in this as I found myself helping to brainstorm on developing a child care program - something I know nothing about - rather than just sitting back and letting the ladies of WRC do the brainstorming / talking. When I caught myself, I scaled my involvement back to simply budget and finance related questions / ideas as that is what I’m qualified to offer. But it’s very easy to get caught up in offering ideas and not realise it is taking away from the voices of Cambodian women that should be leading the work.

A few photos from the day’s sessions:

After the workshop was over it was time to head home. However, a torrential downpour (the worst I’ve seen so far) hampered those efforts. Here’s a video of my ride home on my bicycle (with my phone in a protective case on a rope around my neck). I rode up on the other volunteer so that’s us laughing and chatting in the audio. I actually felt safer on a bicycle than I would in a car or on a motorbike - I’d be so worried I would damage a vehicle or flood the engine! On foot / bike it was just like walking through deep water (but slowly cycling). 

The rest of the week Bunnak and I have had our heads down working away at reconciling some old QuickBooks issues from before Bunnak joined WRC, inputting budgets and learning how to run / format / manage the report outputs, and otherwise slowly chipping away at our goals. We’ve made loads of small achievements along the way and we both get so excited when we accomplish a new goal and move on to troubleshooting the next pain point. It’s really rewarding working each day with someone equally passionate about their work.

A trip to Siem Reap is not complete without a visit to Angkor Wat / Angkor Thom District. I highly recommend going by bicycle and taking your own pace. It’s extremely rewarding and I’m so glad I took this approach. I was able to access areas of the national park that other tourists could not because of downed trees blocking roads (but not too bad a bicycle couldn’t get through!). Unfortunately, no majestic sunrise photographs here because during rainy season it’s mostly just cloudy. In all I cycled between 35-40 kms for the day!

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25% Passes Quickly

One full week has passed with work at WRC, how am I already 1/4 of the way done?! During the first week I got oriented to WRC, reviewed the original goals of the assignment, assessed the existing financial health, and realigned our goals with my general findings. Myself and the Management Committee are meeting today to discuss and agree the plan for the remaining three weeks. After reviewing WRC self-identified pain points I found a few common themes:

Financial procedures / manuals were written by a native English speaking, non-Cambodian consultant. The financial policies and manuals are comprehensive, and align with WRC’s mission. While there are many references to policies relevant to Cambodian culture, sometimes the practical procedures are difficult to align to the policy. Additionally, they are very much focused on written word rather than visual diagrams. As such, a new joiner to WRC must have a very strong / fluent grasp of the English language to really parse through the key messages of the policies / manuals. It costs money to translate them to Khmer, a luxury in the budget that is not available. 

Everyone wears many hats. There just aren’t enough hours in the day. Many practical procedures were developed to align with (non-Cambodian) written policy / manuals. As such, they are very time consuming and can be very manual as well. For example, we’ve discussed that the budgeting process has its own challenges but then comparing budget to actual is a whole new set of challenges because it is not timely and is very manual (pulling profit and loss statements out of QuickBooks and manually updating the Excel budget workbook to see what is left). One of our goals is to find ways to work smarter (e.g. entering the budget in QuickBooks for real time budget to actual analysis with minimal manual intervention), so that finance and accounting staff are freed up for more valuable work like financial strategy.

Some of my most valued skill sets are taking complex financial concepts and making them accessible to non-finance people. Simplifying what we say with less words, and using more visual diagrams where that’s appropriate. Though many of the team here are trained financial / accounting professionals, the language of WRC finance / accounting must be in English because of the donors and Board of Directors. As such, in order to simplify the language we use we can leverage techniques used in making the information accessible to non-finance people.

Are you an accounting or finance professional Interested to learn more about offering your skills pro bono? Go visit www.afid.org.uk for more information and to attend a workshop.

Below a photo of me and Pisey, Program Manager (who has been with WRC for 10+ years) working through budgeting challenges.

Below a photo of me and the finance / accounting team brainstorming some process improvement ideas (Bunnak and Vanthat, Pisey has my camera).

Cambodia in August - Packing Pro Tip: Cambodian culture requires women to dress modestly by ensuring their knees and shoulders are covered (men should not be bare chested). I brought a number of tank tops and cotton sweaters to wear, an outfit I commonly use in Amsterdam. That was a mistake. Tight fitting cotton in this humidity is awful. I mostly just wear my linen blouses over my tank tops and that is much more comfortable. I also brought a number of long skirts to wear (because flowy / breezy and covers my knees, right?). However, those are not practical for riding around on my bicycle! So I’ve taken to either tying my skirt up around my knees to ride around, or, I pop on some yoga pants and ride back and forth this way. I keep my skirt in my backpack and slip a wardrobe change in the bathroom easily. Sorted! Lastly, I brought 3 pairs of work shoes to wear with my outfits. Completely useless, hah. I just wear my strapped on sandals (so they don’t fly off while cycling) into the office and then we set them outside of the door before we enter the building. We walk around barefoot. So..... waste of space usage in my bag.

Here’s a short video of a downpour passing through one afternoon (very relaxing to listen to while we work).

Now that we listened to some soothing rainfall....

Let’s have a frank discussion about motivation for volunteers. There is another volunteer here with WRC from Australia (she is not with AfID, she provides services unrelated to finance / accounting). We were discussing some volunteer aspects the other day related to WRC and I inquired if WRC would ever take on any volunteers that don’t have a qualification for the skills that they are offering. The answer was no, and I was very happy to hear that. Volun-tourism, usually fueled by a white savior complex, is a global problem of unqualified volunteers searching for a purpose in life (or an excuse to travel - which itself a valid motivator) using disadvantaged / vulnerable communities as a prop for their ego or Instagram photos (not a valid consequence). Their motives can be selfish, and their lasting impact on local communities can be questionable at best. For people reading this that are considering volunteering outside of your home country (like playing with children in an orphanage or teaching in a school) - ask yourself the question “Would I be allowed to perform this job in my home country without any qualifications?” if not, then you probably shouldn’t be doing it in someone else’s country and should question your motivations. Take that one step further, if a foreigner came to your home country and started volunteering services they were not qualified to offer (like minding children in an orphanage without a social worker qualification) how would you feel? If that turns you off, then you should question your motivations for doing it in someone else's country. If this discussion makes you uncomfortable, sit with that and reflect on why. If your actions have bordered on white saviorism before, process any shame you might feel and become a voice for doing better. I am working to educate myself more about these issues, once of those ways is by listening to a Podcast you can find on Spotify called Tiny Spark: https://open.spotify.com/show/4YFNbRn1vJmpRrwtL3bg1S

Women’s Resource Center was formed by a non-Cambodian woman but was subsequently handed off to Cambodian women to run and manage as they are best suited and qualified to understand and meet the needs of their communities. I’m honored to work with an organisation that doesn’t enable volun-tourism.

Some photos of my lovely apartment in Siem Reap.

Some more snaps around Siem Reap.

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Warm Welcome

My first day with Women’s Resource Center was this past Monday and after a few days I can just say “wow” - the group of women that run WRC are amazing and the work they do is fantastic. Some background on WRC:

Women’s Resource Center was founded by Gertrude (Judy) Larkin in 2008. Larkin, a trained clinical social worker, had spent two years volunteering with the Angkor Hospital for Children assisting with outreach in the villages of Siem Reap province. Through her interactions with Cambodian women, she saw the prevalence of depression and poor maternal and child health. She was inspired to help her Cambodian colleagues start an organization to respond to these needs. Larkin assisted in the organization’s start-up development phase; then left the organization to the leadership of Cambodian women, believing they best know the needs for other women. Women’s Resource Center opened its doors to women on 10 December 2010 (the International Day of Human Rights).

Their mission and values are as follows:

Mission: Women’s Resource Center provides women and girls in Cambodia with emotional support, referral services, and informal education so they can be empowered to make informed decisions about their lives.

Vision: We envision Cambodia to be a fair and safe society with equal rights for all. Women and girls will be empowered, educated, respected and able to make decisions about their lives.

My first few days at WRC have included getting settled in and oriented to the organisation and the team. We scurried away from the office at one point to pick up a bicycle for me to use during my 4 weeks in Siem Reap. I can confidently say that living in Amsterdam firmly prepared me for my first cycle through Siem Reap (no worries: I am wearing my phone in a case around my neck in this video with both hands on my bicycle):

Over the course of this week myself and the Management Committee at WRC have been working away to orient me to the organisation, review the original outline goals of this assignment, and discuss how we will plan to prioritise the goals (in case we cannot achieve them all in the 4 weeks). Our main focus areas can be summarised in the following points:

Reviewing Finance Manuals and procedures to ensure they are fit for purpose and aligned to what actually happens in practice. 

Identify any financial based training needs (and begin training if appropriate).

Assist the Finance Officer with increasing her knowledge of QuickBooks and using any under-utilised functionality of the program.

Reviewing any frustrations with the budgeting and budget vs. actual processes to recommend and implement improvements. The entire staff at WRC are heavily involved in the budgeting process so we have a lot of different stakeholder expectations to manage on this one.

Everyone has been very vocal with the process which is great to have such positive engagement from everyone (from finance across to program management/coordination teams). I think we’ll have a really great time working together.

A few shots of the lovely WRC grounds where the finance team sits with the program management/coordination teams on the top floor while on-site programs are run on the ground floor.

Siem Reap is also known as a very large backpacker / tourist destination. For the most part, I have not come to Siem Reap to meet other “foreigners” but am more interested to get to know the community that WRC serves. That being said, I can meet some of the community by doing a few tourist activities while I’m here. So this past Sunday I made a visit to Happy Ranch Horse Farm and took a lovely 3 hour sunrise horse ride through the country side (the coolest time of the day!). It was just me and my guide Yan so we had a great time duet singing Michael Jackson and Celine Dion tunes he learned from YouTube. https://www.thehappyranch.com/

Yan hitting those high notes like a professional!

My kind of nap! 

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Motivation

You’re back. Let’s dive a little deeper into why we’re here.

Short story time: I started my career in public accounting / consulting where in the earlier years Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) was mostly about people getting together 1 day out of the year, putting on corporate logo t-shirts, and going to a soup kitchen or a food bank to put their hands to good use and snap some feel good photographs. It felt rather disingenuous. Like it was more about us, and our company, than about the people whose lives we were supposed to be impacting. I felt like there had to be something more to this, something where I could actually offer my professional skills pro bono. Like Doctors Without Borders, but for accountants. I spent the next few years exploring ways to offer my accounting / tax / finance skills pro bono and got involved in low income tax assistance clinics and after school financial literacy education programs (for high schoolers). These were still small scale or one off projects so I started my search on the internet for something bigger than me. Through some Google searching I found Accounting for International Development (AfID), an organisation based in London that pairs accountants / finance professionals looking to offer their services pro bono with NGOs/non-profits/community organisations (partner organisations) that are seeking such professionals. AfID pairs accountants / finance professionals with partner organisations that already have established accounting / finance teams and are seeking to supplement their skills or receive assistance with a specific project. I am lucky that CSR has made huge advancements since the beginning of my career and many companies (such as the one I work for) now recognise that employees like to give back to their time in their own unique ways, and support us in financial and other ways to make that happen.

Motive: I like to quote the TV show classic “Bones” (American crime drama based on the life of a real physical anthropologist and her FBI beau): “What do you want to be when you grow up?” (cute question considering their both middle aged professionals), response “I hope I’m someone who gave more than they took.”

Can I be volunteering my time in my home country? Yes, though I currently live in the Netherlands and don’t speak Dutch yet so my opportunities for volunteering are quite limited. But in addition to my educational degree in accounting I also have a degree in cultural anthropology. I seek out experiencing other cultures so I can always grow my understanding of the diverse world we live in. 

Wednesday I set off for Siem Reap, Cambodia where I will be partnering with Women’s Resource Center (WRC) for 4 weeks. This looks like an amazing group of women and I’m excited to get to know more of them in person. I was excited to partner with WRC particularly because their mission is one that is important to me. If we can improve accounting and finance processes in a way that improves programs offered to the community members that WRC serves, then I’ve served my purpose. 

www.wrccambodia.org/home/

www.afid.org.uk

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Where are you? Where am I?

Where am I? Well I’m in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Currently. But I’ll be arriving in Siem Reap, Cambodia next Thursday to my new home for the following 4ish weeks. I will be commencing a 4 week assignment assisting Women’s Resource Center in Siem Reap with building their financial capacity. Myself and Women’s Resource Center are partners with Accounting for International Development (AfID), an organisation based out of the United Kingdom focused on partnering NGOs / community based organisation / social enterprises with accountants / finance professionals interested to offer their professional skills pro bono.

Where are you? You’re on my blog. If you’d like to learn more about AfID please visit their website www.afid.org.uk.