The day I fought for 83 cents

As part of my job, I have to match the invoices to the orders and then make sure we receive brokerage for each order. It can be tedious at time but it's important.

Sometimes in my paper shuffling, spreadsheet entering, and whatnots, I'll find some old orders that we haven't been paid for. When this happens, I usually email the company with the list of customer names and purchase order numbers and ask them to dig back into their system and see if they paid us (because I could have missed something) or to pay us accordingly.

Well, this happened one time with the dairy company we work with, Challenge Dairy. I found 9 orders that we hadn't been paid for. So off went my email asking for our money. Back and forth our emails when as they did some research and I gave them more information where possible. We finally figured out that three of the orders had been paid but the remaining six had not been.

Now, each of these 9 orders were special orders, sold to Costco, for 1 bag (55 lbs) of milk powder, which I was aware of. Another thing I was aware of was that for milk powder, Challenge Dairy only paid us .25% per pound. That's right...not a whole lot. But I didn't do before starting this whole fiasco was to figure out exactly how much money was at stake here.

So imagine my surprise when I receive the following:
CD: I will add them to next month’s commission payment (payment for these 6 orders totals $.83).
Me: The total for all six is $0.83?? Woop-de-doo…had I known that I’d probably would have ignored them. Oh well…thanks for checking into it. We’ve already spent that amount just in me typing these emails.
CD: Yeah – I thought that whopping amount was pretty funny. I tried to keep the sarcasm out of my email when I gave you the total amount owed. Glad you saw the humor in it too.

I promptly informed my boss that he MUST spend that $0.83 very wisely...I had worked so hard for it. I can just imagine that my co-workers at Challenge Dairy must have had a good laugh over this. I know we did at this office!