Its Tuesday, right?

Time for a Ticked Off Tuesday post!

So yesterday I finally received the Cost Share Agreement document that I have been waiting 3 weeks for. This document is a signed agreement by 5 European countries to pay their portion of a 36,000 dollar bill for the completion of some Technical Order updates. There is already a Delivery Order for Lockheed Martin to do the work, but they underbid and the countries needed to pony up the shortfall. No problem, right?

Now this document that I received is filled up with long lines of groups of numbers that spell out the exact account and billing line that is to be used by each country. And one country changed just one line- meaning my task just jumped from simply delivering the document to the Contracting Officer to creating a new Purchase Request to be applied to the existing Delivery Order. Damm! But creating Purchase Requests has recently become much easier due to implementation of the Comprehensive Cost and Requirements System which allows me to fill in the form by looking at the actual form, so this shouldn't be too much trouble. This is a huge improvement over the old Automated Business Services System which uses fields in a database form to populate the correct portions of the form, which you can't see until the process is nearly done. The new system is great; fast, visual and logical and a real improvement over ABSS.

But the EPAF country funding people and systems aren't included in the new system! I have to struggle through the old, clunky system, after figuring out whatever my password might have been the last time I used the program. And after I verify that the one country that changed their billing code couldn't be persuaded to adjust back to the original codes. What a pain!