No Accounting For It

I am the family accountant. Well, maybe that overstates it slightly — let’s just say I’m the adder and subtracter of family funds. I’m the bill-paying guy with the Radio Shack calculator. Every Sunday I sit down at my little desk and decide who gets their money and who doesn’t. At the end of each month I balance the checkbook, which is an onerous task because we use our check card for everything, so the bank statement, when it arrives, is often confused with the greater metropolitan Boston telephone book. One month the mailman needed a forklift to deliver it. I can’t prove it, but I believe our monthly statement is longer than Santa’s Naughty or Nice list. It’s pretty damn long. But I dutifully hunt down every deposit and expenditure, check them off, and then, at the end, discover how bad my arithmetic has been for the past few weeks.

When we lived at the old house, bill paying was simple. After the first few years, after we finally got past that stage where we were just barely scraping by and I had to work two jobs, after the missus and I had gotten some significant increases in pay and refinanced the house several times, it became “see bill–pay bill.” Every Sunday I sat down, put the bills in front of me and wrote checks out for every one of them. Boom, boom, boom. Done. It was beautiful. Nowadays, with the new house and the rental properties and the added expenses that have cropped up, I’m forced to play this little game where I make note of the amount of the bill, find out when it’s due, and calculate when the nearest Sunday is I can write a check for it without the payment being late. I’ve got one funky escrow account I use to pay the mortgages from and another one for the property tax and homeowner’s insurance. For an absent-minded, former C average math student whose left brain couldn’t punch its way out of a wet paper bag, this can often seem risky and little scary.

But as challenged as I am in the arena of quadratic equations and square roots, I would like to go on record as the man who coined a brand new bean-counting term. Although the Massachusetts Board of Public Accountancy will never recognize my long-repressed and hardly-evident mathematical genius, someday CPAs everywhere will pick up and apply this word. Want to know what it is? See, you know how when you’re adding and subtracting your deposits and expenditures the running tally is usually a number like $457.32 or $893.21? Pretty random, right? But every once in a while, when, say, the tally number is $632.78 and you just entered a purchase you made for a gasoline fill-up at, oh, $259.78, the new tally number becomes $373.00 even. Just zeros to the right of the decimal point. It’s like a little miracle, isn’t it? Well, here’s my name for that: the “square-up.”

So the next time you’re doing your figuring and ciphering in your checkbook and that happens, you just remember old Schprockie’s word for it.