Allotment day

It's a love-hate affair with allotment day for me. In layman's term, its pay day but it's for my ships' crews.

Love it because it marks the end of a month where I will also be getting my pay and it indicates that we have survived another month in working..yayy...

Hate it because its especially stressful for me on this day. I am required to compute the USD equivalent amount of the crew who wish to receive their pay in Indian rupees and then advised my treasurer where he would called up the bank to buy the rates. It is usually done at 12pm where the Indian bankers start working and we have to wait patiently for the rates to be advised before inputting into our system and then lastly upload into our bank's system.

Besides this, I would need to do 1 final check on the sums of the various remittance to be done that day, double checking the correct bank to be remitted and then prepared files for the different type of  bank remittances. All these have to been done on the morning itself, else the system will reject the files.

Many a times, I have to battle with the short time frame, especially with the India rates where the approval time is at 3pm. Granted if we got our rates at 12pm exactly, it leaves us with 3 hrs to upload into the system, not forgetting sometimes, there will be errors within the file, system will be down, bosses' schedule for lunch, meetings etc.

We always have to be the last to go for lunch and only after confirmation that bank have received all our instructions den we are able to go for lunch with a peace of mind. On good days, we get to go at 12.30pm but during bad days 3pm is consider lucky.

So far after doing this for nearly a year, I'm glad to say I can handled the situations better as compared to when I 1st joined. Sometimes, there is a sense of accomplishment after the whole exercise. Knowing that the 200++ crews are counting on you and your team to pay them on time for their various expenses back home, you know you have alot on your shoulders :)