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!
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