The Liability of Inheritance

A program manager I worked with inherited her budget the same week she inherited the job, halfway through the fiscal year, stepping into a program that was itself brand new to the organization.

I was about a year into the organization myself at the time, still learning how things worked. In her first week, I sent her a friendly welcome email. The standard thing, letting her know if she had questions about her budget or needed anything, my door was open.

I didn’t hear from her again for three months.

The silence ended when I got copied on an email from my GL accountant, asking her about some coding questions. Her reply technically answered the question. But reading it, it was clear she didn’t actually understand what she was being asked, although she was doing her best to sound like she did.

I booked a check-in meeting with her that week. Reserved the room for two hours, because I already suspected what the real conversation needed to be.

I could tell she was nervous as soon as I walked in. At times like this, I often dislike the executive title. I sat down, introduced myself properly, and told her I owed her an apology.

She looked relieved, and confused. “For what?”

“For offering to help if you needed it, without making the effort to make sure you believed it was genuine. Your response to my GL accountant’s questions suggested you don’t understand how the accounting system is designed. And since you didn’t just say that, I can reasonably assume you’re afraid it’ll reflect poorly on you. It won’t. Our system can feel overwhelming to new managers. I wouldn’t expect you to understand this without someone explaining it.”

Then I asked her three questions: Had anyone explained how the coding system worked? Did she understand how those codes fed into the budget that was built? And were there any issues with that budget, as built, that she felt needed to be addressed?

I suspected the answers were no, no, and yes. That’s why I’d booked two hours.

By the end of it, the whiteboard was covered. Starting with the framework for the accounting system and what each code section represented. Then her primary program code, the current budget built for it, everything missing from it, and the variances we could already predict just from knowing what the budget had failed to account for. That last part mattered most: if she knew in advance which variances were expected, she could stop spending her energy explaining the known ones and start watching for the ones that actually meant something.

I put a standing 30-minute check-in on the calendar every month for the next three months, so the progress from that meeting didn’t quietly erode the way progress does when nobody protects it. The following year, we built her budget together from the start.

What stayed with me wasn’t the coding gap. It was what she told me about why she’d never said anything. In every role before this one, accounting had shown up in her work life one way: the department that told you no, the department that showed up when you’d made a mistake. Not partners. Watchdogs. Not really about trying to help, but being there to control.

That was its own kind of inheritance. A quieter one than the budget, and a far more common one. Most of us are carrying some version of it: assumptions about how a system, department, or a person will treat us, formed somewhere else in some other job, long before we ever meet the people who’ll be doing the treating. You can inherit a liability without anyone ever entering it on a balance sheet. The budget was easy to point to and fix. The inheritance underneath it wasn’t.

I hadn’t done anything heroic. I’d just shown her a different version of what accounting could be.

A version, I’d argue, of what accounting should be inside every organization. Not a gatekeeper. Not a watchdog. A partner. People there to offer expertise, service, assistance, not judgment. That shift doesn’t require a program, a policy, or a budget line of its own. It requires someone willing to ask three questions, instead of assuming three answers.

If you’ve ever inherited something at work — a budget, a system, a reputation you didn’t build — and spent months quietly trying to make sense of it rather than admit you didn’t understand, I’d like to hear about it. It’s a more common inheritance than most of us let on.

This is the second piece in The Scribe Principle series, on what it actually takes to build accounting relationships based on trust instead of silent correction. Next up: what has to be true before someone is handed coding authority in the first place — because ownership without fluency just sets people up to fail differently.