Embrace the oops!

I can recall a time that I was working as a contract employee for a company and made a massive mistake on a payroll. I mean, massive! It was an error on the CEO’s cheque. I was only contracted for another few months, and this meant I had 2 options.

I could avoid it, and let it be. After all, someone else would reconcile at the end of the year. I’d get a review from the employer, and hopefully be employed after I left before the error was found.

I took the other road though. I went into the CFO’s office and showed her what I discovered. We quickly made a plan to correct it, and thankfully I did just that. The company hired me fulltime not long after. I guess honesty is the best policy.

One time I paid salary to an employee who went on maternity leave. My co-worker told me that we could wait until she returns after an year and can claw back. But I thought we will speak with our supervisor and something can be done right away that will be great. I told my supervisor and she contacted the employee right away, and the employee was nice enough to return the money.

We have payrolls to calculate source deductions based on the totals for the pay period. I process a monthly commission payroll and one day I selected a monthly pay period that we have already paid. The taxes, CPP and EI doubled. Luckily we were able to pull the bank file and correct the information.

I forgot to check the paydates- something I normally did every cycle. Paid half the company a week early !

I was very frustrated by a person who had “dumped” work on our department last minute and wanted it yesterday. It was a huge undertaking that was not planned for and the person kept checking in with me every 4 hours to see when we would have it done. In an angry moment I forwarded their email to my manager with a not very nice comment…..or so I thought. I had hit reply and sent my very unprofessional and negative comment to the person instead of my supervisor. Luckily, either this person had a great sense of humor or knew they were being a pain and they sent a funny comment back to me. Taught me to keep my opinions in my head and not in emails or messages

Reminiscent of the #dearintern twitter feed? I’m sure everyone working with a mailing list macro or formula has slipped up on execution.

Many years ago (when it was still taboo to discuss wages publicly) I accidentally sent a pay grid to a group of middle managers that included the pay scale of their 1st and 2nd supervisors because I had a formula backwards. Started some great conversations about pay transparency, but it absolutely was not the way I wanted to start the conversation.

Uploading online timecards with the wrong date parameters….having to delete out of payroll and entering back into online timecard system 🙁

I mistakenly deducted an advance payment 2x (wasn’t shut off in our system), for the CEO–no big deal, right? 🤣 Fortunately, he found the situation funny & was great about having it refunded to him with the next pay.

I just got employed with an organization on a contract basis. Benefit deduction was missed for that pay period which resulted in a lot of reconciliation. I could have caught this if I had checked the previous pay periods for a pattern.

Yes, I can definitely relate to a few of the Oops’ mentioned above. One certainly learns from ones mistakes though 😄

I find that many mistakes are made are due to imperfect systems and are perfect opportunities to make improvements so that mistakes can be avoided in the future.

I also paid out an employee who went on maternity leave. Her last day was different, but she decided to leave a week early. I figured it out while doing JE’s. I went to my manager and told him about my mistake. We had two options – to pull back the payroll or to contact the employees and ask to pay it back. We choose the second option. The employee gave us the cheque. It was easy but I felt really bad. I was not able to forget this mistake for a couple of months.

I’m a numbers gal and sometimes I make spelling or gramatical errors (did you catch it? lol). This sucks when using social media for work, especially when I spend time curating videos and I can’t go back and edit them…I installed Grammerly and it is super helpful for checking my work now.

That type of oops is why the to/cc/bcc email addresses are the LAST thing I enter when drafting an email now! 😁

Me too!! 👍

I entered a birth year incorrectly and the system did not deduct any CPP for about 6 weeks, had to explain to the employee to recoup the totals that should have been deducted. Now I verify more often to ensure all data is entered accurately.
Also reimbursed instead of deducting, was able to cancel the bank file and correct thankfully!

For a while at our company, we were uploading pension contributions manually. I accidentally uploaded the wrong file, same pay date, but the prior month. Had to reverse pension entries for 367 employees and upload the correct file. Because the error required help from our Pension administrator, it took forever to correct, but we were able to fix the entire blunder. The only positive thing about making a massive errors is you generally will never do it again. 🙂