Laid up with Laytime Calculations

 

 

Istill remember being overwhelmed the first time I had to calculate the laytime for one of my Saudi boss's six general cargo vessels - be it the "Mofarrij-A", "Mofarrij-B", "Mofarrij-C" "Mofarrij-D", "Mofarrij-F" or "Mofarrij-G" - and his hundreds of other charter vessels.

All those NORs, SOFs, WWDs, SHEX, and SHINC, and the small print in Charter Parties were far more confusing than accountancy's simple dictum that for every debit there must be a credit. It's done with computers now but back then in my Greek salad days (with my apologies to Shakespeare's Cleopatra) in my office overlooking the busy port of Pireaus it was still done the old-fashioned way with paper, pen and hand-written time-sheets. I was often laid up for days with lengthy laytime calculations!

 

In my office in Piraeus

 

After a desperately placed classified in the ATHENS NEWS, I was lucky to find Bozenna, a former employee of Polfracht, a Polish shipbroking and chartering company in Gdynia (which is part of what my former fellow-countrymen used to call Danzig, but we won't go there now), and with a vastly over-qualified master’s degree in maritime transport economics.

"Nie ma problemu", said Bozenna and set to work, often craftily interpreting Charter Parties to swing the calculations in our favour. It proved to be a fortuitous encounter, just as it had been for Bozenna in 1979 when her Polish employers had sent her on a holiday replacement to their office in Piraeus. Two days after her arrival, another Pole, a marine insurance broker, invited her to dinner - and the rest is history.

 

Bozenna and Tadeusz (Ted) at the SAVOY Hotel

 

I know that history well because by the time I got to Greece in late 1982, Bozenna was already married to Tadeusz, the marine insurance broker, and both became my best friends during my time in Greece.

 

Ted in full flight

 

As it turned out, Bozenna was not only smarter than me in calculating laytime but also smarter than me by staying in Greece. Those years were the best years of my life, SHINC (Sundays and holidays included).

 

Never go to sleep at night until the debits equal the credits

 

 

The accountant of a large business had the same daily routine: on arriving at work, he would unlock the bottom drawer of his desk, peer at something inside, then close and lock the drawer. He had been doing this for thirty years.

The entire staff was intrigued but no-one was game to ask him what was in the drawer. Finally the time came for him to retire. There was a farewell party with speeches and a presentation. As soon as he had left the building, some of the staff rushed into his office, unlocked the bottom drawer and peered inside. Taped to the bottom of the drawer was a sheet of paper. It read, "Debit on the left, credit on the right". (This joke isn't funny with Arabs - well, nothing is - whose debits and credits are vice versa and who - another piece of trivia - while also writing from right to left, write their numbers, like the rest of the world, from left to right.)

I wonder if this joke made the rounds of accountants who in 1994 had gathered in the small Italian town of San Sepulcro to celebrate the publication five hundred years earlier of the first book on double-entry accounting by the Italian monk Luca Pacioli (pronounced pot-CHEE-oh-lee), who was born there circa 1445.

While Pacioli is often called the "Father of Accounting", he did not invent the system. Instead, he simply described a method used by merchants in Venice during the Italian Renaissance period. His system included most of the accounting routines as we know them today. For example, he described the use journals and ledgers, and he warned that "a person should not go to sleep at night until the debits equalled the credits!" His ledger included assets (including receivables and inventories), liabilities, capital, income, and expense accounts. He demonstrated year-end closing entries and proposed that a trial balance be used to prove a balanced ledger.

Practising Pacioli's teachings afforded me a comfortable living, and although my personal life was not always perfectly balanced, I never went to sleep at night until all the debits had equalled the credits (or, to get an early night, by posting the difference to a suspense account, as Ganesh Sharma Krishna in Singapore so shrewdly observed).

 

An old view on NewViews

 

 

In the late 1980s, just after I started my Canberra Computer Accounting Systems consultancy - a strictly one-man business, just me and a telephone answering service with the ever-changing voices of all those invisible girls who made my clients think they were dealing with a large computer software house - I fell in love with NewViews, developed and sold by Q.W Page Associates of Toronto. Those Canadians are pretty smart when it comes to recording their loonies!

 

 

It was a dream-come-true accounting software for the accountant who had been handed the proverbial shoebox full of invoices, receipts, cheque stubs, and back-of-an-envelope scribbles from which to construct a set of financial books. One could dive right in and start recording from any point for any period as NewViews was totally flexible and non-modular and totally date-driven. It offered the feel and flexibility of an endless array of spreadsheets, created on the fly, while preserving the integrity of Pacioli's double-entry bookkeeping together with an unalterable audit trail.

The flexibility came with a trade-off, however, as NewViews was perceived by some to have a long learning curve, and to require a greater investment of time and effort to create a customized accounting solution. In a software review published in InfoWorld, NewViews was compared to "going to a tailor and handing him a bolt of cloth and a pair of scissors. The result will suit you perfectly, but at a greater cost of time and effort than if it was ready-made."

I took to NewViews immediately and found it a pleasure to use and I did a lot of bespoke-tailoring with it! I am pleased to see that today, forty years later, it is still alive and well! For more YouTube clips, click here.

 

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P.S. Grahame, you could have bought NewViews instead of asking Ganesh Sharma Krishna to develop that speadsheet-based accounting software!!!