Just Numbers

Working in treasury and finance for a mid size company has put me in some interesting situations. One thing I think of from time to time is the amount to money I deal with or see on spreadsheets on a daily basis. At times I deal with very large numbers. For starters, every spreadsheet I work with is at least shown in thousands. No one cares about seeing the full detail of numbers. If a lot of calculations are being run, people become very comfortable with variances of 5 – 10 thousand dollars. If someone is attempting the very challenging task of reconciling our database with some other list of numbers, and that person can come within 10k, they did a great job. There are times I do high level calculations that are only shown in millions, and if I’m off 1 or 2, it is simply chalked up to rounding errors. It is odd how comfortable I can get with working with such large numbers, and at the same time not be ok with my personal checkbook not tying out to the exact penny.

I oversee the insurance for our company, and consequently oversee the spending of approximately 7 million dollars a year. That is real money that I receive invoices for, review, and submit to my boss for payment approval. These numbers are often regular payments, but occasionally not. Last week I had to walk into my boss’s office with the bad news that some large claims came in and we had to write a check that day for 160k. These thinks happen, and I’m use to it, but from time to time I realize the craziness of the words I am speaking.

The big project I have been working on for that past few months is an insurance claim for a machinery failure at one of our plants. This has been a challenging, partially exciting, partially sad project that I have dedicated a silly amount of time to. All of the manufacturing of this plant relies on this piece of equipment that took 5 months to fix. This essentially shut down the whole plant and just ruined their business for that time and will most likely never recover from all of the customers they lost. For some help, we have an insurance policy that covers such an event. I have done all of the work on this claim and have had all of the contact with the insurance carrier. I have assembled mass amounts of data and presented it to all of our executives for their review before submitting it. After submitting this data, I have had some meetings with the insurance carrier to discuss the details of the claim. The basis of these meetings is another one of those odd moments to wrap my mind around the reality. I am person representing a company asking other people for a few million dollars. Weird right? “Hi I’m Zack, nice to meet you in person. How can I answer any questions, and when can you write me a multi-million dollar check?”

The peculiar part of working with such large sums of money is how comfortable I can be with it. This brings me to the challenging part, how does it relate to my relationship with Christ when I spend over 40 hours a week focused on money. It is my job and we are certainly called to do our jobs well, but when you think about not focusing on worldly things, money is one of the big ones. I’m not saying that I’m living in sin by having the job that I have; these are really just thoughts that happen to be flowing through my head. I could most likely chalk it up to trying to live a balanced life in a fallen world, but maybe I shouldn’t.

Anyway, those are my thoughts for the day. Thanks for reading.