Invoices in error.
A consultant I worked with told me this one.
The company he was with at the time supported a stock control, ordering and billing system and one of their larger customers was in medical supplies. In meetings, one little problem that always came up was the ability to key any number into the order quantity field. This was exacerbated by the fact that they had one employee who had a habit of banging the date into said field which, being numeric, the system would happily accept.
The discussions on this always went the same way. Due to the nature of the business, the only viable fix was to add a max OQ value at product level. A Big Change and the customer wouldn't spend the money. In theory they could add a horrible bit of validation that would scream if the OQ validated as a date, but numerous examples existed of said employee not keying the date into the wrong field correctly (if you see what I mean).
One day, at the regular support meeting, their senior Sales and Credit types produced a piece of paper:
"Look at this! Six million fucking quid! We'd have been in deep shit if this hadn't been spotted."
"Well, you know the fix and what it will cost. We've been round this one many times."
"We have to do something....."
"Anyway, what did you do to correct the account balance?".
"Oh that. We just raised a matching Credit Note."
"You only have the Invoice here, what happened to the Credit Note?"
They got stuck in the door trying to get out. Too late. Already printed and mailed to the customer....
Biting the hand that feeds IT
