My boss, his mum and the mistakes

[Familyproblemsatwork]

I have a situation at work and I hope you can help me with it. First of all I love my job, in all aspects apart from the one I'm about to write about it's great. Good pay, good colleagues, interesting work. I don't want to leave.

My boss is great. His mum is our bookkeeper. She makes so many mistakes I've never known anything like it in a professional environment. As she's working in the accounts accuracy is super important and we use Sage and another cloud based system to record and store our accounts. Every single entry she makes has one or more mistakes in it. It makes searching for something online a waste of time as she'll have misspelt the name of the company or the product bought. That's without going into the numbers!

I correct it where I can and where I see it but my job is super busy and I don't have time to check every piece of her work. I'm not her boss but it does affect me in my role as I have to report financials onwards. I often have to explain to customers/management why their statement is wrong (as an example).

I've spoken to him about this a couple of times. It's really awkward. He's very aware of it but has done nothing about it. She's 70 but has no plans to retire as she loves what she does!!! He pays her a very good salary (not that that is any of my business - but it does stick in my craw that I'm explaining and correcting her mistakes when I'm paid less). I know this for a fact as I do payroll. I've never mentioned pay to him as its not my place.

What would you do and AIBU?

I’d stop covering her for the mistakes she makes. Any customer queries i’d direct back to your boss and his mum.

Exactly that. Any queries from clients, cc in your boss and his mum and say "xx can you help here, there seems to be an error".

Yep, you've got to stop doing her job for her.

Is tour job to ensure accuracy before doing any submissions?

If so I’d do the checks, and then email her with a list of the corrections to be made and I’d copy him in. I’d not do the corrections myself.

Thank you. I hate passing the buck as it were. I hate saying it's not my job I just tend to get on with it. We're a small company who all muck in and help each other out.

I agree with PP , pass it back to her and her son , unless it is your job to check and verify the figures are correct.
What would happen if you made a mistake on one of the corrections figures you had corrected , would it just get brushed off ? I doubt it somehow .

You are not helping the mum by covering up her mistakes , she wont learn if she does not know that she is doing anything wrong

Stop covering. It’s not saying it’s not your job to forward them back to her saying seems to be a mistake here.
And it is your place to talk about your pay. You could say I used to fix them where I saw them but I got too busy. You didn’t seem worried all the times I mentioned it.

It's not my job to check her entries are correct. But it is my job to keep the business looking it's best in the eyes of our clients, suppliers, etc and her mistakes make it look like we're amateurs which we're not.

So I think the two go hand in hand. If I passed it back it would delay things as she rarely reads emails properly and won't answer her mobile as she doesn't recognise our office number (despite ringing her for 4 years!!). She withholds her home number because her husband wants her too. It's such an odd situation!

If she won't answer then refer it up to your boss every time. Not in a "look how useless your mother is again". Just "Hi boss, customer asking about a change in pricing, I just want to check if it's something you've changed or if its an error I need to run by mother." Or just CC him in every email you send her asking her to correct company names and addresses, then he'll see she doesn't respond.
You're covering her too much and its not your job, he probably doesn't see how her errors are affecting his business.

Really, its not your problem and you could just ignore it but if you start losing business over it then you'll lose out.