When someone is put in charge of a department where they have no idea how the work gets done, it is going to cause some problems.

What would you do if your new boss refused to approve expenses for things that you knew you needed?

That is what happened to the IT guy in this story, so he just agreed to keep his spending under $500 per purchase so she didn’t have to approve it, and ended up buying everything he wanted.

Here are the details.

Won’t approve my purchases? OK, I can work with that.

I was a one man IT shop at a small manufacturer. I had been there for years.

Wow, he got into the company early.

I was actually the 3rd employee ever hired and now the company was like 120 people. I was very frugal, but in smart ways.

I got a lot done for little money and always was looking out for the company. The owner recognized and respected this.

I have a feeling this accountant isn’t going to know how things work with IT.

Anyhow we had gotten big enough where I didn’t report to the owner anymore and I was assigned to report to an inexperienced accountant who got her degree from some sketchy on-line school. She was going to change the world.

I used to be able to just buy anything I wanted because the owner knew when ever I asked for a company credit card, that I had already done my homework and it would be good for the company.

Just about everything in IT is over $500.

Well now, if anything was over $500 I had to go through this process with her to justify it. It wouldn’t bug me except that she had no real business savvy or common sense.

It was just painful to me to try and explain the most obvious things to her and she would fight it just because of power-tripping or something.

This should be a no-brainer I would think.

Example: I was trying to justify having at least one computer loaded up and ready to go as a hot spare for when someone’s broke.

She balked at having $1500 sitting on a shelf unused.

Computers break, it happens all the time.

I tried to explain that about once a month someone’s computer would break. All she could see was the $1500 sitting unused most of the time. She couldn’t understand the real cost of a broken computer.

That the person could no longer do their job effectively. Parts not getting ordered. Jobs not getting expedited. Emails not getting returned.

Me having to drop everything to react to this situation, overnighting in parts. The true impact cost to the company was several hundreds of dollars every month.

It would pay for itself, and make life easier on everyone.

She couldn’t see that having a spare would pay for itself in half a year or so. After a half an hour of fighting over this I had an epiphany. I handed her requisition approval forms to her told her she was right and left.

Any purchases under $500 didn’t need any approval at all.

Now this is following the letter of the law.

Now NOTHING I ever bought was over $500.

I didn’t buy a spare computer. I bought 3. As parts. And assembled them into computers. Servers, network storage?

Why justify to a bean counter who wouldn’t understand anyway? Just buy more parts and assemble yourself. Dual monitors for everybody! (bought one at a a time).

Hey, she made the rules. This guy is just living with them. Brilliant.

Let’s see what the people in the comments say about it.

Perfect explanation.

This would be really funny.

Hey, that works out really well.

This is a smart move.

Wow, that is quite a change.

Sometimes accountants understand the math, but not what is behind it.

Or at least, they pretend not to.

Thought that was satisfying? Check out what this employee did when their manager refused to pay for their time while they were traveling for business.