Worried about a mistake at work

[Tillow4ever]

I discovered on Friday that I hade a mistake on a form at work that I completed a few months ago. I was trying to work out why one of our customer invoices for a promotion they ran for us was so much higher than the pot of money we had accrued to cover this (basically, for every unit of our product they sold at the promotional price, we agreed to pay them a certain amount of money - we forecast how many units we expected them to sell, multiplied it by the agreed amount, and accrued that money to pay the invoices against). When I did some digging, I realised that I had put the wrong pence per unit amount on the form - I had taken the amount in the wrong column on a spreadsheet because I forgot that, unlike our other promotions, this one has a permanent off invoice discount as well as the promotion funding - I put the off invoice discount in the box.

This has resulted in just under £130,000 more being invoiced than would have been if I had put the correct trigger on the form. The moment I realised what had happened, I reported it to the account manager, apologised profusely and explained what had happened, then offered to contact the customer and pretty much beg them to honour the usual trigger as it was clearly a mistake. The account manager has said to hold off til Monday, he is going to speak to the buyer as our relationship is good with the customer at the minute. I asked if I should let my line manager know, but he told me to wait until Monday and see what the customer says first. I pulled all of the sakes and invoice data on Friday so we could calculate the amount exactly, and I’ve sent this plus copy invoices etc to the account manager.

I have spent the whole weekend thinking about this, feeling sick and terrified I’m going to lose my job, I have worked here for 22 years, I’ve been in my current role for 13 years and am seen as an expert in what I do - but ultimately I’m very low in the business and easily replaceable.

The business is a multi billion pound, global business. So whilst it’s a massive, massive sum of money, it’s practically chump change to them. I’ve saved the business more than this over the years through my record keeping as I’m able to challenge audit claims and prove we don’t owe money that otherwise would be difficult to prove and we’d have had to pay them. But memories are short, and what I saved them elsewhere isn’t going to help me here.

Does anyone know if they can sack me for this? It was a genuine mistake. I’ve owned up the moment I realised what happened (and I am fairly certain if I’d kept quiet no-one would have realised, but I couldn’t do that, I’m not a person who would hide the truth to save their own skin). I am hopeful we can get the customer to repay it. But I’m wondering if this is the sort of thing someone can be sacked for regardless of whether or not it is recovered? I’m spiralling.

Please be kind. This isn’t AIBU - I know I’ve fucked up. I don’t think anyone can be harsher on me than I already am. I’m posting for some empathy and a genuine view on whether people think it is a sackable offence or not. Thank you.

If it was a supplier I had a good relationship with them then yes I would repay. Despite you putting something else on that form there will probably have been a upfront agreement where the usual trigger amount was agreed.

I really appreciate all of the comments, advice and kind thoughts. I’ve always said I would prefer a second set of eyes check these forms, but I’ve always been told that it shouldn’t be necessary. There is something that I do on the form though that we’ve realised in the last couple of weeks has potentially saved us a massive amount of money. There’s a very much hidden box on a second “details” tab that is auto selected to “yes” on a column called “Subsidiary Supplier”. What it doesn’t tell you is having this left at yes means they can invoice you the triggers for stock they buy from another company. Luckily I was aware of what it meant, and painstakingly change that to no for every single item on every different area of their business (this is approximately 440 boxes to change from yes to no per form, so not a quick task at all). We’ve recently become aware of them deciding to buy our product elsewhere, and because I do that on the forms, they can’t claim any funding. I am hoping that this will help “offset” any negative repercussions, as I estimate it’s likely saved the business over a million pounds so far.

About to serve up dinner, but I’m feeling a little less anxious now. I’ll check back again before I go to bed though. Thank you all!

Hiya. Is anyone responsible for checking your work? I see you say you are admin support, does anyone double key this in to the system to ensure accuracy? If so, you are not to blame, if not then you have identified a process failure. Also, you should tell your boss. I know you have said the account manager says not to, but you absolutely should.

I agree with @LadyFlumpalot. This is a single point of failure and there should be some checking that goes into this process.

Also, you have immediately owned this, gathered the paperwork and done the calculations; and you have a reputation as a conscientious employee. If they don't see that then they are unreasonable. Try not to fret.

I forbid you from worrying about this any more.

You have done absolutely the right thing by confessing, despite how scary it must have been. Any decent workplace will never blame this on you. At my current employer, similar things have happened and remediation has been required, with multiple discussions and escalations. But never has the individual involved been held responsible and has been barely named. And this is a US investment bank, hardly know for being particularly fluffy!

On the other hand, in the unlikely event they did sack you, well, that says much more about the culture of the workplace, and you really do not want to be there anyway, so getting out would be a good thing.

I am a massive worrier about these things but have learned that these things are rarely as bad as they initially seem. So please don’t be so harsh on yourself. The worst is over so try to relax. Easier said than done but I can nearly 100% guarantee you will be fine.

Xx

I work in account management so fully understand this scenario and I would never imagine you would be sacked for this OP. The account manager will hopefully get sorted with the customer, but even if they refuse to pay back the miscalculated amount then the account manager should be able to negotiate something better than worst case scenario with the buyer I would hope. For example, a deduction or some other addition to your joint business plan with this customer. Depends on how valued a supplier you are and what the relationship is like I guess. But it sounds like you’ve added loads of value to processes in your role so to penalise you for an honest mistake like this would be so unlikely.

It’s understandable that you’re worried, but if a member of my team came to me with this, I’d not bat an eyelid. We’d figure out the size of the problem, and work with the account manager to mitigate if possible.

If it was an example of repeated carelessness, it would be my responsibility as a manager to notice, and work to resolve. As an example of a very uncommon human error from an individual, I’d point out the staff member is, in fact, human, and chalk it up to experience.

I expect you’ll not do it again.

All that said, I would expect to hear it from you, regardless of what the account manager was saying. Pop a call / meeting in tomorrow, ‘fess up to the issue, including the maximum risk the company is exposed to, and what might happen to reduce that.

you’ll be grand, I’m sure.

I must be a bit thick but I'm struggling to understand how your company works.

I was trying to work out why one of our customer invoices for a promotion they ran for us was so much higher than the pot of money we had accrued to cover this

why does your customer run a promotion for you? Doesn't that make them a supplier/agent/partner, rather than customer? Who is serving whom and why are you invoicing your customer?

So we are a food manufacturer. Our customer is a large supermarket chain. They buy product from us - hence are our customer. We invoice them for this.

We then say to them, if you run a price promotion in store, and sell at a maximum price of X, we will give them an additional pence per unit sold of funding. So of the promotion is save 50p, we might pay them 30p per unit sold, and they fund the rest. The customer will then send something called a retro invoice for the number of units sold multiplied by the agreed pence per unit. They will deduct this value from their payment to us. I check the invoice and process it onto our system which creates a credit note - we match that off with the deduction they make.

I hope that makes a bit more sense! I absolutely love my job, it’s so varied and no two days are the same. This is the first time I’ve been dreading work in the morning.

I do feel a bit better now. Thank you all.

Hi I work in a department that does billing and the rule is - people do not get shouted at for mistakes - we try to have a culture where people can own up to mistakes and we work out how systems or processes need to be changed to try and prevent the mistake again. Now if you keep making the same mistake …. That is a different issue.

tomorrow you need to tell your manager.

then there really should be a consideration of a four eye check

Why on earth would they want to sack you over 1 mistake in 22 years? They would have to replace you with someone without that track record, who cohld make a similar mistake on day 1! I cant understand why they dont have checks and balances to ensure this doesnt happen. Unless they did but got so comfortable with your great usual standard that they let those slip?

You will be fine. This is something that may have been flagged at audit so you’ve caught it early.

OP - I would just send a credit note and a re-issued invoice for the correct amount. I assume from your earlier post this is a barter so no actual funds have changed hands here. As they are a huge client it shouldn't be an issue. Shit happens. Don't beat yourself up.

I think this is it. It was always supposed to ge the account manager sense checks the nomination forms, but over the years the various account managers have said they don’t have time to be checking someone else’s work, and they might as well be doing it themselves if they have to and that they trust me to manage it. It’s something I usually check multiple times before hitting submit as I’m paranoid about getting it wrong…. So either the document I was using to get the triggers from was wrong (absolutely no way of proving this/finding out for certain) or I’ve checked against the wrong column so everything looked correct. Throw in a madly busy day and this is what has happened. I’m known and praised for my strong attention to detail… so I think I’m more disappointed in myself which is perhaps making me catastrophise the situation.

The plan is definitely to talk to my boss tomorrow, the account manager just wants us to have the customers response as well so we can either say “I’ve realised I’ve made this mistake, this is how it happened, this is how I’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again and the customer has said they’ll repay it” or we say all of the start and that we are in discussions with the customer for how to recover it. The account manager didn’t seem worried, he was more relieved to understand why we were so under accrued! It’s just typical this had to happen on the biggest promotion we run. Couldn’t happen on the promotion that would have cost us a couple of hundred quid, could it?

I’m going to bed now, can get in nice and early that way to get on top of what’s needed and make sure I have time to discuss it all.

Thank you again everyone.

Probably not going to help much but ...in the classic business book ' How to win friends and influence people' by Dale Carnegie ( multi millionaire) he cites a case of a manager that had been a good employer for years , working diligently and saving his company money. But one day he made a similar mistake to OP, also ' fessed up but expected to be sacked
He wasn't . Company owner realised what an asset he had been to the company and what a waste of resources it would be to get a new , unknown employee to replace the guy that made the mistake . Hope your firm realises that too, they should.

Thank you! I like to hope I’m well
thought of enough, and that my work is usually of an exceptionally high standard that I will be told not to worry, and be allowed to help try to make it right. I’d rather not cause work for other people to fix my mistake.

Try not to worry, you’re human and humans make mistakes. But I would think about what could be put in place to ensure it doesn’t happen again. That way you’re going to your manager with a solution too.

You’ll be fine. I think it’s great that you’ve noticed your mistake and you’re trying to put it right.

A company isn’t going to want to fire an admin person who has been doing the job for 20 years over one careless mistake, as if they do who knows who they would get to replace you in that sort of role. They’ll want to keep your experience, and even though you say you’re right at the bottom of the pecking order, the fact you’ve stuck around there for so long means you do have a lot of knowledge - even if it’s only relating to admin and processes, it can still come in handy sometimes.

Please don’t stress about it, as I say with it only being an admin job and there is limited damage you can do. It’s not worth the worry - it’s easily sorted by your manager, I’m sure. All you can do is make sure you learn from it and not start making more mistakes. I suspect as you’ve been there 22 years and I assume you didn’t have a job before this that you will most probably be in perimenopause and this isn’t without its challenges, a couple of them being lapses in concentration and brain fog. Being aware of it and taking extra care over what you’re doing, even if you think you know it inside out, will definitely help you.

Good luck, tomorrow will be just another Monday.

I think the fact you owned up immediately and actually care will be positive. I also think your previous performance and reputation will be taken into account.

You wont be the first person to mess up and you wont be the last. You will never make this mistake again though.

Maybe you can look into why this happened and come up with ideas of how to stop ot happening again the future. Should there be some sort of safeguarding in place? I deal with amounts of less than £2000 in work but they are literally triple checked as standard. Maybe your place needs additional checks over a certain amount?

Good luck tomorrow.

Please do not worry @Tillow4ever people do make mistake and I ve made all sort that had a budget impact

all I am gonna say, and I think you should really consider this , try to run any final figures via chatGPT (or whatever you use in your company )
if you give it the right input it can do similar calculations and then you can compare with your figures

you re very humble, you accepted it’s a mistake and companies always allow for human error ..btw 100k ish is not that much !

good luck x

OP I also know this industry and I don’t think you’re the first to make this kind of error. Not read whole thread but I would say there’s a process gap here both on your side and the customer’s that the error wasn’t picked up, and that’s not on you but could be an opportunity to improve the process or automate etc to make sure it doesn’t happen again?

do you have a good relationship with with your boss ?
I can see why account manager doesn’t want to tell your boss Initially as probably doesn’t want them jumping in and contacting the customer
don’t mention that 130k is small change to ether company that’s irrelevant
ttoo late now but are you in a union

I do have a good relationship with my boss, although it’s all very hands off. He leaves me in peace to get on with my work basically and we only speak if it’s my quarterly review time, there’s something to debrief to me, or I need to speak to him about something. This was my preferred way of working as I hate meetings for the sake of them.

I wasn’t going to say that about the 130k being small change - I only mentioned it here, not to be blasé, but to put into context the impact of the error on the business. A smaller business that makes 500k a year in profit is very different to one that makes billions. I’m someone who comes from a finance background, so I’m the one who’s worried of things aren’t right to the penny…. This was not an easy thing for me to hold my hand up and say I caused this.

i am not in a union - I’m not sure what union I would join for my type of work/industry.

I don’t think this would work. For one thing, we aren’t allowed to put anything highly confidential into the AI that we use - and our financial info is definitely classed as that! For another, the form I complete is an online portal.

I don’t agree with the customer what triggers we will be paying them, and these do sometimes change in exchange for additional feature, for example. Or if a new deduction is agreed as part of a JBP (joint business plan).

Someone else mentioned peri, and I am very much in the thick of that. I don’t want to make excuses for myself, but this really is very unlike me so maybe it is that. The biggest problem I have though, is all 5 account managers will come directly to me for what they need, and you can guarantee it will always be on the same day and always be urgent. There’s only 1 of me, so I end up having to rush to hit all the deadlines. I’ve flagged this time and time again over the years. I’ve built up over 150 hours in TOIL over the last 3-4 years alone just trying to get the basic job done. If I’m off on holiday or sick, no-one covers my work. It all sits and waits for me to get back. I’m really not trying to make excuses - I’m just trying to explain how it could have happened, because there was just too much work for one person.

These 5am woke ups are probably not helping me either! I will update this evening, or when I get an opportunity, as to how the conversation goes!

Op hide the thread and just focus on going in to work and addressing whatever needs to be addressed with regard to this issue.

You have an unblemished records and been there for decades. Trust yourself.