Expensive Mistakescoopsweb asks "What's the most expensive mistake you've ever made? Should I mention a certain employee who caused 4 hours worth of delays in Central London and got his company fined £500k?"
No points for stories about the time you had a few and thought it'd be a good idea to wrap your car around a bollard. Or replies consisting of "my wife".
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chthonic, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 11:26)
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Accounting for dummiesI used to work as part of a financial systems team, on an IBM AS/400 system. In one of the input fields of our very badly designed fixed asset system, when you put in a value (in dollars), you had to remember to press the 'field exit' key, and not tab out of the field, or it would append zeroes to the end of the value, resulting in a $100 transaction going through as $1,000,000,000,000,000.
Which should be easy to correct right? just reverse it. Nope. In order to reverse it, you need to type the value in again with a minus, and you can't do that as you have no spare characters in the field for the minus. So instead you have to take the whole system offline, and manually remove the original entry from all the systems, doing backups as you go, all of which which takes a minimum of 8 hours. Eight hours in which thousands of accounting staff across the world have no access to their data, and no way to input new data...
And nowadays with Sarbox compliance, it couldn't even be fixed like that...
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calibrax loves teh hamsters (not in that way), Fri 26 Oct 2007, 8:30,
1 reply)
hmmmwhy not just - two lots of £500,000,000,000,000
(, Fri 26 Oct 2007, 8:52, closed)
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