I work for a small business and handle the books as well as HR. The business has two separate entities and owns 7 real estate investment properties with different LLCs and investors. One of the entities is a property management business, and I'm responsible for managing the budgets and operating expenses for all of the clients (approximately 125 properties and owners), and overseeing A/R (rent collection), A/P (500-600 invoices weekly), and monthly and yearly financial reporting. I have one full-time A/P direct report, two virtual assistants, and one part-time direct report. Besides the owner, I'm the only person authorized to be in the "corporate" books ( 2 company entities plus 7 investment LLCS), so I'm pretty busy, and never finish my daily to-do list. I do my best to prioritize what I think is important each day, and I've received nothing but praise from the owner about my job performance.

This past week, we reviewed budget vs actuals through Q3 for the business as a whole. The books were clean, the numbers were strong, and there was really nothing that stood out as a problem, until we came to "Miscellaneous Office Supplies". This is a catch-all account for toilet paper, coffee, coffee creamer, paper, etc. Our Office Manager orders these supplies as needed, the owner approves, and I handle the entry in QuickBooks. We looked at the budget vs actuals (right on target), and compared year over year -- we're actually down in this category by 12% from last year.

The owner is concerned that not enough attention goes to this account, and wants it broken down into 40-50 different sub accounts. So, a line item on the budget for toilet paper. And sponges. And pens. And post-it notes. And paper towels. And copy paper. You get the idea.

I explained that coding the entry as Miscellaneous Office Supplies is efficient and breaking this out into all the sub accounts would greatly increase my time spent on coding these orders. Time that I don't have. He countered that office supply orders are a great opportunity for employee theft, and I need to have better controls in place to monitor this.

(A little back story. He had an accountant steal money from him in the past, so he's very nervous and concerned about employee theft.)

I feel he's exercising me to demonstrate he's paying attention and being a leader. There was really nothing to criticize, so he honed in on the office supplies as an "area for improvement". I also think his past history with theft is clouding his judgement. He's constantly tasking me with developing efficiencies in the department and finding ways to grow the business without adding additional staff. Knowing how I am, I will deprioritize coding these orders, and then spend some weekend or holiday catching up on journal entries and budgeting for toilet paper and coffee creamer. My state and city has different sales tax rates on groceries ("junk food" is taxed higher than something like coffee, there's a special tax on each bottle of water, etc) so there's a lot of time and detail that will need to be spent on this.

So, am I being unreasonable, or is he? How do other small business accountants handle the accounting of toilet paper, pens, and coffee creamer?