20
JsonBoa
311d

My company just acquired another company from some losers.
Gotta load their pittance database onto our thing.
Their entire "Technology Department" is one old fart.
One even older fart runs their accounting.
I asked the IT boomer for their accounting data.
He tells me to get the head accountant.
The head accountant says they do not have any historical accounting data.
I threaten to call the (equivalent of the) IRS on them.
They give up, admit that they do have some historical data. But they attempt to pull a "malicious compliance" on me, send me a pallet full of old receipts, on paper.

I do what I have done one hundred times before, I go to the closest community college (equivalent) and ask/bribe a teacher to offer the most trustworthy kids some pretty pennies to scan all those files for me.
A dozen of them barely took a week to do it using their not-so-bad camera phones.
It all for about the same price as a couple of older-but-still-good iPhones.
Then it's on to some simple OCR and data normalization tasks.

This morning I had another meeting with the losers, the first since I told them their "data" had just arrived in the mail (but a couple weeks after that). They log in for the meeting all smug, thinking we would ask for more time to load their data, and it would be my team's fault for any delays.
Then the regional business evaluator logs in and said he reviewed their financials yesterday and we have a lot to talk about.
I will remember their "just got punched in the gut" faces forever :)

Comments
  • 7
    The moment you take financial data to a third party is the moment I raise my eyebrow.
  • 1
  • 3
    @kamen I would agree if it was about my company's operations, but it was some losers who just bit the dust.
    That will get published in the bankruptcy proceedings anyway, in a couple of years. Frankly, even my Sec guys didn't care. Legal might raise an eyebrow, but won't care either. Too little to bother.
  • 0
    Do OCRs work that well?

    I attempted to make a script that breaks down some receipts for me. They didn't work too well
    and every receipt required some tweaks to be read

    tbf. I didn't know much about ocr. asked chatgpt to get me started
  • 2
    @iceb you gotta shell out for the paid SAAS ones.
    AWS, GCP and Azure have not-useless offerings.
    You could use some FOSS solutions, but you will spend quite some time tweaking it.
  • 0
    Damnnnnn !!
  • 3
    I disagree with doing the work for someone non-compliant

    And if your place would've blamed you for that sounds toxic af

    Though maybe you started the problem by calling them losers
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