You need to raise your pet using a system [Era]

Chapter 39 The Village's Current Predicament

The main job of the production team's accountant was to manage money and accounts.

By keeping accounts, calculating accounts, and auditing income and expenditure, one can grasp the economic situation of the production team and help the production team leader manage and make good use of the team's money and materials.

In Shihua Village, the accountant and cashier are both the same person, which makes Lu Yuanqing extra careful.

Even after sorting out his work, he decided to reconcile accounts with the team leader every month, not for any other reason than to ensure his innocence.

However, after seeing the village's current financial situation, Lu Yuanqing's desire to quit never stopped.

We were truly destitute!

Especially after seeing the detailed allocation list, Lu Yuanqing almost fainted.

The villagers owe the village... Oh! No... There are very few families that don't owe the village.

There was no other way. The famine had just ended, and many people in the village had starved to death. This year, things were finally starting to look up, so of course we had to focus on production.

But the villagers were too hungry to move and had no strength!

Naturally, after the village harvested the potatoes, everyone rushed to borrow grain from the village.

This has resulted in the current accounts looking very 'good'.

Lu Yuanqing took a notebook and went to the brigade leader's house.

"Yuan Qing is here! Have you eaten? Come and have some with us!" Zhao Zhongcai was also eating at the time and greeted him politely.

Lu Yuanqing was not a shameless person. In this era, it was considered very polite to say something polite when it came to food.

Anyone with a modicum of sense wouldn't agree to that.

“Eat it yourself, don’t worry about me!” Lu Yuanqing said with a smile.

After he finished speaking, he noticed that the people from the brigade leader's family treated him a little better.

Lu Yuanqing was speechless. How did it happen that he arrived just when it was mealtime?

However, he has to work during the day, so he really doesn't have much time.

Zhao Zhongcai didn't say anything more, but instead sped up his eating.

After finishing their meal, he pulled Lu Yuanqing aside to ask him why he had come.

Lu Yuanqing didn't keep him in suspense and directly took out the account book to show him, "Captain, look, Uncle Zhao Wen's family has already borrowed a lot of grain from the village!"

"What's wrong with that?" Zhao Zhongcai asked, flipping through the ledgers with a puzzled look. "Yuanqing, you know what kind of year it was last year. Everyone was starving for so long and couldn't get enough to eat. How are we going to get production going this year?"

Lu Yuanqing then showed him the detailed allocation list.

“This…” Zhao Zhongcai’s pupils suddenly contracted.

Lu Yuanqing: "That's the reason!"

“According to the village’s rules, when distributing grain each year, the first thing to do is to pay off the debts owed to the village. The village was in a bad situation a few days ago, so it’s normal for everyone to be a little worried and scared. But Uncle Zhao Wen borrowed more grain than he could pay off.”

After checking the situation of grain borrowing in the village, Lu Yuanqing felt his vision blurring.

It's understandable that people were afraid of hunger and worried about the worst-case scenario a few years ago. However, the fact that they were so prepared for the worst that they practically wanted to take all the grain from the team home made things really difficult for Lu Yuanqing.

Of course, such people are only a minority; most people are quite enlightened.

Zhao Zhongcai was furious and said, "It must be old man Zhang. He's so old, and he doesn't even know how to stand up for his last post. There are standards for borrowing grain in the village. How can you do this so carelessly?"

Lu Yuanqing shrugged and offered no comment on the former accountant's character, focusing instead on the task at hand. "Uncle Zhao, pursuing this matter isn't the most important thing right now; we should be thinking about what to do!"

"Uncle Zhao Wen's family's account books from a few years ago were quite interesting. Every year they were overdrawn. They would borrow money before the new year, pay it back when the grain was distributed at the end of the year, and after paying back the team, they would become a poor household again, and then borrow from the village again, like a cycle."

If this were in later generations, he would be a major credit card user!

"How much does Zhao Wen's family owe the team now?" Zhao Zhongcai asked.

Lu Yuanqing showed him the account book he had redone and said, "This is the amount borrowed. The overdraft is not a small amount. Based on the situation in previous years, I have made a rough estimate. Even if the grain is distributed this year, his family will not have enough to pay it back."

The debt is too high!

So when other families receive their share of grain, his family can only watch.

Lu Yuanqing could almost see Zhao Wen leading his family, pointing at him and cursing him, then smashing his table.

There are about five families in the village in the same situation.

He should inform the captain as soon as possible, lest those people take advantage of his young age and think he's easy to bully, and cause him trouble.

Zhao Zhongcai was also at a loss, not knowing what to do!

The village was too poor; everyone relied on the distribution of grain to survive all year round.

Zhao Wen and his group's behavior was despicable, but as the team leader, he couldn't just stand by and watch people starve to death, so he resolutely refused to lend them any food.

Zhao Zhongcai took out his precious cigarettes, took a few puffs, and then, perhaps feeling that smoking couldn't solve the problem, he stubbed out the cigarette on the ground and put the remaining half back in the cigarette box.

Lu Yuanqing raised an eyebrow at the sight.

"Yuanqing, what do you think we should do?" Zhao Zhongcai asked tentatively. Actually, he wanted to ask this smart man if he had any ideas on how to solve the village's poverty problem.

His village was one of the poorest in the surrounding production teams, and he always felt ashamed whenever he went to meetings at the commune.

But seeing that Lu Yuanqing was still so young, they wondered what solutions he could come up with to solve this problem!

Lu Yuanqing said, "There is a way!"

"What?" Zhao Zhongcai looked at him expectantly.

"Change the distribution principle!" Lu Yuanqing said, enunciating each word clearly.

“The current distribution principle in our village is ‘70% for people and 30% for labor.’ This is unfair to strong laborers. They think that since they have 70% of the basic food rations, they only get 30% of the work points. For them, working hard is about the same as everyone else, so they are passive and slack off.”

This is what Lu Yuanqing has personally experienced over the past few months.

The current situation in the village is that people are enthusiastic about eating, enthusiastic about finishing work, and enthusiastic about distributing grain, but not enthusiastic about working.

The men in the village earn about the same number of work points as the women each day.

It's important to understand that women are born with physical differences. Not to mention, in impoverished families, men usually eat the most food at each meal, as they need to have the strength to earn work points.

Judging from their request to borrow grain from the team, outsiders would surely think that Zhao Wen's family was in dire straits and had no other choice but to do this.

However, Lu Yuanqing and Zhao Zhongcai, both from the village, knew the real situation.

The Zhao family, spanning three generations, lived together without dividing the household; there were approximately fifteen people in total.

It's normal for a large population to lack food, but you should know that most of the people in their family earn full work points every day.

"Captain, look at this!" Lu Yuanqing took out the work record book from previous years and pointed to the information of Zhao Wen's family to show him. "Zhao Wen's family has nine adults, but only Zhao Wen can get ten work points every day. The other adult men earn fewer work points than the women every day!"

That's right, all the women in his family occasionally earned full work points, but among the men, only Zhao Wen was able to get them from beginning to end.

I don't know how to explain this as not slacking off!

Zhao Zhongcai was astonished. These problems were not visible in the previous reports, but they were obvious after Lu Yuanqing made the changes!