Insist on the Room

Billing and QuickBooks. That mistake took a fair few hours off my life at a client.

They work with persistent cases, queued through an intake. Human led research in a Jira wrapper and task queue. The intake I could look at. Actual data, on a screen. Billing, however, was too sensitive and fragile. Relevant eyes only.

Well, I've needed to add it into our system. It needed two hours, a room, and a whiteboard. What it got instead was a game of telephone - three or four people relaying what "the invoice" meant and how the line items were calculated. We played whackamole against a moving explanation.

I should have insisted on gathering the room.

Once words like that leave the person who owns the numbers, every hop makes an edit. What arrives is a version. By the time it reaches the builder, "the invoice" is a compromise nobody would treat as true. I kept building the latest version. Every "final" call felt like progress. Repeats of the conversation with a rattled reconfiguration of verbs.

Intake did not go this way. The case was on the screen. Client, date of event, the file that arrived late. We could disagree about a field, because the field was sitting there, go and look. An invoice cannot be disagreed with, it'll wait for the next billing cycle. The accounting will fix it, and then let us know in an angry email, for the next iteration.

If you cannot put the thing on the table, cut it from the month's work, stop until you can. I did neither. I've rebuilt the thing half a dozen times.