Numbers

For the last five work days, I have been working on collecting and analyzing data for the two reports that are due next week. The funding FROM my program is responsible for a large percentage of the child care budget SEAC is working with, and the funding FOR my program is quite reliant on these two reports. So I've been a little stressed.

I could talk about a lot of stuff, including how incredibly disorganized my new office is, how much work I have to do, how desperately I want to get things under control, and how much I am loving this new aspect of my job.

But I want to talk to you about the subject of numbers and integrity.

We had a certain number of clients last quarter. We dropped a certain amount of clients and we added a certain amount of new clients. This comes out to the magic number of 120... and ALL week long I worked to get to that number. It should be more clean cut than that, right? You count up the files and you match it with the database and voila it's golden.

That's not exactly how things have been done at SEAC. We didn't have an accurate database of clients, and we have about 3 client files that are completely missing. As in not anywhere in our office. And because I live in fear of getting audited... this causes complications. We certainly cannot count clients that we don't have evidence of participation for... can we?

I struggled all week to maintain professional integrity. Do you know how easy it would have been to simply "delete" this family and pull their file, or not drop that family and leave their file in the records? Do you KNOW how easy it would have been after HOURS of trying and trying to make the numbers work? It would have been so easy.

But alas, at 12:47 on Friday afternoon... the numbers worked. And all was right with the world. I can't do much, but I can promise that when I am doing this again in preparation for the 4th quarter report... it will NOT be like this.