AAHS Salutes Our ‘Huntington Beach Hero’

As we continue the process of consolidating our offices at our Flabob headquarters, the prospect of losing one of our best assets, our team at Huntington Beach, looms over our operations. We’ve done interviews, found replacement skillsets, and completed training sessions, but we realize that replacing the genuine love and interest in AAHS’ well-being that our bookkeeper, Synde Resler has provided for us, will be hard to duplicate.

Syndy started with AAHS in 2019, (our first paid bookkeeper position), replacing Tom Butz, who previously had been performing the bookkeeping function as a volunteer. Syndy started her position with little or no documentation on any of the office operations, and had to learn most of what goes on at AAHS ‘on the fly’. Syndy, a quick study, not only grasped all of the necessary accounting functions needed at AAHS, she easily took on other much needed functions that had been lacking in AAHS’ management practices. Consolidation of supplies purchases, creating separate bank accounts for specific needs, creating an Office Operations handbook, working with vendors to allow AAHS to take advantage of payment discounts are just a few of the many actions Syndy took the lead in completing, for the benefit of AAHS.

Syndy managed AAHS funds as if they were her personal checking account. When an electric bill from the Headquarters office seemed excessive, Syndy drove 65 miles round trip to review the Edison meter onsite, and confer with Flabob airport personnel to get to the root cause of the discrepancy. Syndy always provided AAHS leadership with financial options to improve on a planned management decision, or, to mitigate costs where possible, like generating planned cost forecasts to evaluate the impact of rental storage for AAHS vs purchased storage containers.

Syndy’s great skills with numbers, while extremely important, has not been her greatest contribution. That has been her interaction with AAHS members and volunteers. As an office manager, Syndy became the voice most often heard by our AAHS members when calling or emailing the organization. Her genuine enjoyment in helping AAHS members with their questions and queries has made her a favorite with everyone.

Clearly, AAHS has come out the better organization for having Syndy’s time and attention. All of us at AAHS recognize Syndy as our Huntington Beach Hero and thank her for her role in getting us where are today. She and her contributions will be sorely missed.

Thank you, Syndy!