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.
No comments:
Post a Comment