Value of Value in Kind: Walmart

By far our most complicated VIK goods supplier is Walmart, from which we have many sources of information. For example, There are multiple people who have collected receipts from various shopping trips to Walmart, deliveries to the pavilion or Expo Village, and there has been usage by IVG, the company that we outsourced our retail and food service management to. These receipts cover many different types of items such as daily necessities, appliances, and furnishings for the student ambassadors residences; office supplies like furniture, writing utensils, staplers, etc for the pavilion; supplies and food for several parties we have thrown in the pavilion, and even paying some labor with Walmart credits.

For the student ambassador apartments, we purchased insect spray, sunscreen, televisions, microwave ovens, dishes, clothes hangers, and so much more; for the most part, these items were purchased in person by multiple staff members, which complicated my job to an extent (chasing them down to retrieve receipts). Finding the receipts was only the beginning however; once the receipts for these items were given to me, I had to make dark copies of each receipt in order to preserve the record over time; next, I had to translate the tiny, mostly illegible, sometimes nonsensical Chinese characters and phrases into names of items in order to verify that they were in fact being used for the purposes of the pavilion or student ambassadors. This was an impossible task for an American with only 3 years of formal Chinese instruction, and was actually exceedingly difficult for many of the native Chinese people in the office. In order to make up for this and to prepare for the time when my coworker Carol could translate the receipts, I entered each receipt's items by code, quantity purchased, and unit price into a separate sheet that had several embedded functions: first, in order to prevent Excel from converting a 10 digit item code to a format with commas, I had to save the Item Code column as text; next, I had to format the Unit Price and Total Price columns to be currency format using the Chinese currency symbol; the Total Price column is a product function of the quantity column times the item price function, and the total receipt amount is a sum of the Total Price column. Upon verification that the amount on the receipt matches that of the sum of the items in the spreadsheet, I reference the totals of each sheet in order to calculate the total.

Update, 7/21 - Upon examination of a workbook sent to me by one of my supervisors, the work I have been doing has been somewhat in vain: he had already entered the Chinese characters, quantities, prices, and totals of many of the receipts I've been working on. I can easily copy the characters and paste into translation web sites. This helps me to proceed with my job assignment of calculating the value of the VIK goods, which can help us prepare for the inevitable audit.

Another help for me with this task is that the sponsorship department gave me the phone number and name of a new contact at Wal-mart today! I called her and we arranged for her to give me their records of how much credit we have used. Great Success!

I want to do as much as possible over the next week.5, because next Friday is my last day here!

Value of Value in Kind: Motorola

The next sponsor I need to talk about is Motorola, the electronics manufacturer. Incidentally, this blog post ties in with the China Mobile cell phone bill blog post. In order to be granted the status of sponsor and all of the benefits that accompany it, Motorola gave the USA Pavilion several cell phones to use in our day to day and work tasks; this is a huge relief to many of the employees who must use their personal cell phones to entertain delegations from various sponsors, deliveries from suppliers, solve logistics problems, communicate with coworkers, etc. Not only can this lead to very expensive China Mobile bills, but it can also be very taxing on your cell phone battery and loss of privacy on your personal phone. The solution for this is to assign Motorola-donated cell phones to various staff members and allow them to use company-funded cell phone numbers from China Mobile. The spreadsheets with lists of phones received, their serial numbers, and partial lists of those they were assigned to were given to me by Jake; from that point, I researched the market value of each of the donated phones on various web sites such as Motorola.com. Some of them were so obsolete that the Motorola site no longer sold them, so I had to explore other sites like Amazon.com and Google.com; I also did not know whether I was supposed to find the highest or lowest prices, but therein lies the conflict of interest: Motorola wants to donate a large dollar amount, but we have to keep them honest by looking around.

The next problem I encountered was that some of the phones were not being used for various reasons: some were never functional, some had batteries that were faulty, some were just too large and obsolete to be practical, and others were just unused because people don't want to have multiple phones in their pockets. I had to track down all of these phones to discover who was using them, if they had been transferred to other people, lost, returned for whatever reason, or still working well. I am the manager of the Motorola phone inventory spreadsheet, as well as the one person who has complete knowledge now of which phones are actually in my possession. It will be this way until my contact at Motorola sends me the complete list of what they have donated to us thus far; this calls into question the issue of business ethics! What happens when a person who is leaving your business in less than 2 weeks has the most complete knowledge of your inventory? A less ethical person might take advantage of that situation, but everyone who knows me knows that I care about acquiring things in a legal and honest way.

Next in VIK series: Walmart. It's a doozy.

Company cell phone accounts

Our labor force in the USA Pavilion consists of the 1)Student Ambassadors and the 2)Full time staff, each of which has different pay, working conditions, levels of responsibility and respect, etc. Sure we get air conditioning, chairs, more leisure time, access to bathrooms, computers, refrigerators, and we get to take our lunch breaks whenever we want, but there are downsides to working in the office; more specifically, to working as a staff member in the office. The reason I have to fill out so many expense reports is that there are times before and after official working hours that special projects/extra tasks need to be completed and were not during working hours. This can lead to many extra expenses, one of which is cell phone bills to clients, coworkers, sponsors, delegations, entertainers, and more; the solution for this is, rather than reimburse people with tons of expense reports every month, we have company cell phone accounts. These cell phone accounts are assigned to specific people, and one of my tasks is to locate these people and enter their names next to their corresponding phone numbers in a spreadsheet titled "Cell Phone accounts." I have tracked most of these numbers to specific people, but certain other numbers are idle and we pay a minimum monthly fee for every unused line in order to have it ready for the next person who needs it. At the end of every billing cycle, we receive a package of invoices that record every fee for for every account, listed by phone number. I tally all of these accounts using Excel spreadsheets, double-check all of my work, and then email it to the assistant head of my department, Emily. She then makes out a check, gets all necessary signatures and stamps, and sends me to China Mobile to pay the whole cost in person. But wait, there's more.

I can't go to just any China Mobile location; I found out during my very first experience paying our bills that most locations only accept cash payments, and after two redirections and several hours of walking and taxi rides, I finally made it to the correct location for paying with checks. Once I arrive, the worker assigned to helping me begins to enter each individual bill for payment; sometimes their scanner gun is working, and when it is not working they have to enter each 15-digit account number by hand. After every invoice has been entered into the list, they will examine the check, call over the bank supervisor, and continue with the process. Some of my visits have been unsuccessful and frustrating for several reasons: maybe the check is unacceptable because of some small error, it has been slightly creased, the signature is in the wrong place, or some other reason that makes the trip useless. If you count all of my trips to China Mobile for the purpose of paying the bills, including the first two China Mobile locations who found out I could not pay with checks, I have had 6 unsuccessful attempts and 3 successful attempts; thus 50% of my trips have been wasted time, energy, and taxi fare (which I reimburse myself for!). Usually it's on my day off or after work, so it's especially disheartening.If they accept the check, then they go through and double-stamp every invoice using a special red stamp and then I go on my way with the invoices in my bag. Having a cell phone when I go is absolutely critical, by the way, because sometimes they do speak English but most of the time they do not. My Mandarin speaking ability is okay, but not good enough to find out why they have problems.

My next VIK blog will be about Motorola and how I match their donations to my efforts in getting the bills paid.

Value of Value in Kind: Marriott

One of our VIK accounts that I must update monthly is that of Marriott which, as a sponsor, donated several hotel room stay credits for our representatives to use. There are several different locations and styles of hotels and executive apartments available for a set number of vacancies, the total number of which was available on the first Marriott-related spreadsheet I ever saw. Every subsequent monthly workbook was updated with the number of room credits used during the previous month, for instance "10 rooms used in Marriott [Location name] during [month]." I then opened my spreadsheet "Marriott prices," which I assembled from an old email that was saved in "Outlook file format" which, when not working on a computer with Outlook installed, cannot be viewed in any other program. In order to type in the price and multiply by the number of rooms used in the various months, I had to somehow install Microsoft Outlook 2010 without having matching instructions from the University of Memphis's IT website (instructions only given for Office 2003 and Office 2007), so I installed my Hotmail account in Outlook (a huge waste, but necessary). I went through each of the Marriott location worksheets calculating the market value of the room usage for the month. After I calculated the last value for hotel ratesThe workbook consisted of several sheets: Totals and the titles of subsequent sheets were the names of their various locations in which we have credits. The Totals sheet has a sum function next to the cell "Total for " that I use to link the products from every sheet to a master sum function and eventually total out the usage for the month. Once I have verified the arithmetic and number entry, I will attach it to an email and send it to my supervisor Emily; the body usually contains the total for the month to give her a heads up. What she does with the information is to record it in our monthly financial statements as "Income," and that's how important my job can be sometimes. They constantly impress upon me the difficulty and relevance of what I am doing, and though it can sometimes seem routine, there are so many facets and people I must speak with to get data that it keeps me in my toes. Much like everyday life here!

Value of Value in Kind: EJ to the Gallows!

Next in my responsibilities for reporting VIK goods is to find the fair market value of these goods. One of the most complicated and time-consuming goods that were donated to our pavilion is wine from E.J. Gallo wineries. In order to be an official sponsor, the Gallo representatives have given many hundreds of bottles of their wine to be used at our discretion. The number of donated bottles, as well as the price we should consider when reporting the bottles, are both important. Once I had received the number from the receiving department, it was time to determine prices; my task was to locate the lowest (bulk) price for Gallo wine so that we would know what to charge IVG, the company we outsourced our restaurant and retail store management to. IVG also manages the lounge area called 1776 which is in one of the wings of our eagle-shaped pavilion, in which they sell various alcoholic drinks to VIPs who come through. Up to this point, we have not charged them for the wine that they sell because I had not found the lowest official bulk price at which we could sell it to them. During my time researching this quite elusive number, by which I mean it was hard to find a bulk sale price for a wine that is already cheap) I discovered how highly rated Gallo wines are among less expensive wines. I explored several alcohol-selling web sites, ebay.com, amazon.com, Chinese distributors, American distributors, several specialty sites, bulk and B2B web sites, etc. I even went as far as to email the “contact us” link several times, and I almost followed my boss’s suggestion to call Mr. Gallo (wherever he might live) at home to ask him about their wholesale price.

I was at the end of my imagination when a girl I had helped out in the office a few times gave me the names of various sponsor accounts, the representative from our office who was dealing with the company, and even more contact information. Eventually, this led to a final contact (Sales manager) who today gave me the information in a spreadsheet, including number of bottles donated, brand names, wholesale price, total price in Chinese yuan and US dollars. Tomorrow, I will insert the total value into my “VIK Thus far” spreadsheet in Microsoft Office 2010 and then my bosses will be very happy with me.

Oh and yes, we use Microsoft Office 2010 in the USA Pavilion. Through 2.5 months usage, I perceive few noticeable differences from Office 2007, and in fact some features are less convenient. I’ll discuss those in another blog post.

Memo that I sent to my supervisors today

To: Ma Jun, Emily Huang

From: Mark Wlodawski

Re: VIK status and bank transfer status

VIK Status

The VIK goods record as of this date is attached to this memo in the spreadsheet VIK thus far; several accounts include the most recent data gathered directly from sponsor contacts in their emails or spreadsheet attachments.

· I have verified several of the Dell deliveries according to their items and dates, but the market values come directly from Dell.

· I am still entering data from Wal-Mart receipts and spreadsheets given to me by Jacob

· Motorola representative promised to update me very soon on their donations

· I contacted the E.J. Gallo representative in order to request their bulk prices, no answer yet

· Several other accounts, such as Laticrete, have completed their sponsor obligation according to emails from our contacts.

I plan next to continue my attempts in contacting representatives and acquiring data. Several of the contacts have been unresponsive, so I have been working together with the sponsorship department to meet other contacts.

Documents that serve as records of receipts, such as delivery notices and various emails and spreadsheets, are being held as printed records in one of my folders and are available for perusal.

Bank Transfer Status

I maintain a running spreadsheet record and a folder with all records of these charges given to me. As of July 7, I have received claims from 5 different employees who each have more than one charge. I will forward that to Emily by July 28.

Beginning of description of VIK

In reporting financial statements, all sources of income must be listed in their various forms: cash and physical goods. Cash is easy to report, as it is clearly visible within bank accounts. Bank statements can be requested at a moment's notice to examine bank account details, including usage activity and current balances. Physical goods must also be tracked and recorded according to their fair market values, in order to properly account for depreciation and such.There is far more difficulty in recording the donation of physical goods on financial statements than in recording income or even donated money. The USAP organization was funded by donations from private sponsors, including city and state governments, a university, but mostly corporations. Some of them donated physical goods in return for certain sponsorship or advertising rights and privileges.

These donated items, called Value in Kind (VIK) goods, are promised at varying amounts inside various contracts. the amount of delivered or purchased goods must be recorded on income statements and backed up with data and records proving the receipt and purpose of usage. This can present a problem if an organization has a time constraint and has no unified, streamlined system of information. A problem I have encountered is that during its infancy, the USAP staff was so busy with quickly constructing the pavilion building that they lost certain documents showing exact records of receipts, so recording proper values for the donated VIK goods was impossible. That's when I started my internship.

The VIK goods are holding us together, cleaning our things, transporting our people, lighting our paths, computing our numbers, operating our systems, heating our coffee, and so on. I must track these items with supporting documentation to show: receipt of the goods, market value of the goods, and information about its current usage. The reason for assembling all of the data and processing it according to the contracts is to properly record and report the value of our pavilion, and in the even of an audit, questions about these items could be easily answered.