I recently took a position as a senior accountant at a telecom company. I was brought on to oversee AP and Purchasing functions, but am now being asked for a budget?! They gave me a strange looking template (different cost descriptors than in general accounting) and told me that at my current burn my baseline would already put me over budget given next years adjustments. Well that's just great what the hell do I do now?

And is this a good buying opportunity for UAL stock?

reduce your current burn rate (take a pay cut), and, no.

Don't worry about your burn rate. If its a telecom company, it'll be bankrupt by next year anyway. I'd also vote no on the stock.

I would try to be crative. Assign budget items to other departments or schedule them for a later fiscal year. Have fun muck it up as much as you can, your going to be gone in a year or two anyway, so it will be someone else's mess.

This is what you do:

Start off with your labor costs, get them from HR if you have to. Then, subtract your labor costs from your "baseline" to get how much non-labor money you have to spend. Figure out how much of it is "uncontrollable", that is, how much you have to spend on such things as square footage occupancy and utilities cost, etc and subtract that. What you have left, hopefully, is your discretionary funds. Assign them to the same categories as were spent in last years "baseline". If you try to rearrange them and assign them to new categories where there is no baseline, the boss will take them away, saying "you didn't need that last year, no need for it this year!"

If you have no "discretionary" money left after subtracting out other items, then you are screwed. You have to either let some people go, or give up some unoccupied office space you are being charged for. If this is not enough, then you have to go to your boss and ask for a "plus up", state that your uncontrollable and/or fixed costs are more than the baseline, and try to justify why the boss shouldn't lay your sorry ass off to make up the difference.

Think it through. There are people in business who are real pros at budget time, and know how to work these things, frame them, to make it seem to the boss that he MUST give you a plus up or the company as a whole would suffer. In a situation like this, you would have him/her by the balls and have a chance to really increase the baseline so as to make next year's budgeting more easy. Choose your battles, think long term, never let them see you sweat. Go get 'em, kid!

Brad, nice try, but no.

She needs to put a budget in only for her own salary, and a nice raise and stock options. Then, once the budget is cut to a one person shop she should skip a level and complain to her boss's boss that her boss doesn't care about AP nor purchasing and ask the one-level-up boss for more baseline.

Then, she has the opportunity to start her baseline anew at a nice comfortable level.

WARNING, don't try this in your own home, or if you are a beginner. This is strictly advice for advanced budget-time performers with some political savvy.

Yeah! Gotta love the front lines of American capitalism!

Gas, the only problem is that by eliminating the layer above her she will be taking on more work. It is nice to argue philosophical points about budget and salary, in hopes of securing the options and bonus into one's "baseline" but not at the expense of 12 hour days?!

Not to mention the fact that your advice might very well get her fired. She needs to play the game this year, and play games next year.

Just make up numbers that look good, then have the results certified by Arthur Anderson.

Why don't you accounting geeks take your discussion to some other board. Perhaps you can try www.boring_occupations.com. This is a travel board.

Feeling a bit over your head, are you, "xxx"? You're just the one who'd jump in with all four feet if the discussion had to do with body functions.

xxx is right. This discussion does not belong on a travel board. I've alerted the Fodors editors. You'll need to dispense your cheap accounting advice elsewhere.