My first banking mix up. My expenses were debited from my company bank account for twenty whole pence less than I had written the cheque for. It came to light this morning as I was auditing my accounts, and reconciling everything against the friendly automated statement service. It read out that a cheque had been debited for a whole round figure, a rarity in my expense experience. My personal bank account statement showed the figures correctly, so I was up twenty pence at the banks expense. Big money, I think you’ll agree. As my techie side is versed in such delicious hacker stories as Cliff Stoll’s excellent book “The Cuckoos Egg”, I enjoyed a brief flight of fancy that my accountancy error highlighted some serious hacking and espionage. Unlikely of course, but I called up the bank and let them know.
After giving the cheque numbers and so on, I explained my personal bank statement proved a mistake at their expense. Now I have a picture of bankers as people who like things to be neat, tidy and “Just so“. All their columns adding up and balancing out perfectly. No nasty figures either side of a balancing zero. It seems I was wrong. A bit like my perception of accountants has been seriously skewed since getting to know a few of them, both personally and professionally. I thought they liked nice balanced figures, didn’t touch alcohol, and were flawless in their professionalism… But then I think I was a little naive before…
But I digress. The girl on the end of the phone was pleasant enough, accepted there was a problem and all that, and that it was they who were out of pocket, but she said the only way to resolve it would be to recover the cheque at my expense (something like £10), and verify the values. Well, sorry, but there my altruism comes to an end. I’m twenty pence better off in the grand scheme of things, and they’re out of pocket by this amount. So I’m certainly not about to fork out whole pounds to put things right for them. So I’m leaving it like that.
Goodness knows how I’ll explain it to my accountant when the reconciliation doesn’t balance out, but I’ve made notes all over my cheque stub. But I’m still rather puzzled a bank would give up on the matter so easily, and I’ll certainly be double checking my bank statements in future. For some reason I can’t now justify, I always assumed things just worked out perfectly… But twenty pence is a sixth of the bus fair into town, so hey, I’m going to live it up a little tomorrow 
Entries (RSS)