Or not. While the expenses come in handy, if I wanted to spend my time on the motorway, in between counting endless barrels of lager, bottles of gin and once-fashionable specialist beers, I would have trained with the Institute of Licensed Trade Stock Auditors, rather than the prestigious accountancy body that accredited me - whichever one it was.

While the work has been a bore, you can see why yours truly was nominated for this glorified stock-take. FD has his heart set on a state-of-the-art spreadsheet, which he's labelled "the most important piece of collateral this entity is currently engaging with". Which is a pretty way of saying the year-end stock provision was an absolute balls up.

The amount of stock we carry is a material figure pored over by directors and investors alike. But the year-end provision was flapping around like an overused Post-it and no one knew why. So when FD started getting unpleasant questions from the audit committee and the board, and realised those lovely-jubbly finance function bonuses were likely to disappear, he swung into action.

In fact, the first suggested solution was to get one of the Big Four to "set up a system". But the cost of the job would have wiped out FD's bonus anyway. And since we've already paid for the Excel licence and I'm salaried, FD sees it as a win-win situation.

The audit committee asked for a secure, reliable monitoring and reporting stock system, hence the need to review every bit of fungible in the country. But while spending every lunch hour in a roadside caff was a little tedious, the spreadsheet for measuring and managing the stock provision system was a gem. The idea, of course, was not to get the "right" number, but one we could get by the auditors - materiality is a wonderful concept.

We designed a system that produced a figure based on a weighted average of the figures we had from our physical inspections at randomly generated locations. Sadly, while my original random number generator picked only sites within the M25, FD made sure the selected outlets were representative of Blaminio's national estate. The swine.

The whole thing took a mega-spreadsheet with a host of interlinked worksheets using some of the calculation functions in Excel that, shame on me, even I didn't know existed.

The only problem was time - it took months to bed down. The auditor had grumpily signed off the last year-end figure but was clear that he would be looking at stock provision carefully next time around. But, after nearly eight months, the spreadsheet and the random counts began to resemble something that was acceptable all round.

It was then that FD told me the bad news: as part of a new year-end orientation programme - that is, extra work that would allow the auditors to charge more - my stock system was to be ”pre-audited” to highlight any areas of concern. So, no time to redo the figures if necessary. The auditor - in fact, one of his young, cheap-suited sidekicks - arrived and spent hours looking at my spreadsheet.

I felt a twinge of anxiety. But then the junior emerged and with great excitement told how he had vertically and horizontally summated a random selection of the sheet covering various locations and times. He could therefore conclude the stock provision figure was materially accurate and the audit would be focused on more "risk-sensitive areas" - my money's on the executive bonus scheme.

At first I didn't quite get it. Then it dawned on me. This expensive auditor had spent hours and charged thousands to tell me that Excel spreadsheets can cross cast and down cast. And mine did. From that we can conclude Blaminio's stock figure is as clean as a whistle. Trebles - which might be doubles if you actually measured them - all round.

BARRY CELLS is number three in Blaminio's finance department. He was talking to Peter Charles who definitely does not agree with his views on licensed trade stock auditors, the competency of the Big Four audit firms and life outside the M25.