Tears wouldn’t have poured – if only he had planned ahead
The lore of payments dismay is never openly shared by companies who fail abysmally. Those who get caught are forced to apologise whilst hanging their heads in mortal shame. Whereas the lucky ones must keep their lying streak going perpetually, hoping that their deceitful act is never unearthed.
Filed away in hidden archives from the prying eyes of the world, we’ve uncovered a collection of untold stories, from which we share one real-life example. To give you a flavour of the terror that has brought businesses to their knees, here’s an excerpt from the AccessPay “Little Book of Payment Horrors”…
Why do you cry Mr CEO?
A major internet and telecoms firm thought planning for staff absence and sickness was an overrated practice that they could ignore – Oh how wrong were they!
When a bout of The Plague struck, the persons responsible for processing wages through the Bacs system were being led away in a hand-cart. This meant the company was forced to submit their monthly payroll through the same-day CHAPS system instead.
Rather than being charged approximately £25.00 for the entire Bacs payment run by their bank, they incurred 192 individual CHAPS charges at £23 per transaction – I know! Shocking, right?
Faced with a hefty bill of £4,416.00 what else could the CEO do but cry into his cornflakes every morning for a week. To this day, no one has brought forth this story in the off chance that it gets the CEO bawling again.
Lessons learnt
Contingency – Whilst this was not exactly a disaster of biblical proportions, it is worth considering a contingency payments service, in the off chance you’re unable to make a payment for some reason or another.
Advance Submission of Payments – Promote timely planning and schedule payment submissions in advance, and you’ll never have to chuck large sums of money at payment problems ever again.
Faster Payments – If they had done their research – and not panicked – they would have realised that you can process same-day payment through Faster Payments for £1 / £3 per transaction. This would have saved them £3840 – Hindsight is 20/20.
Segregation of Duties – To preserve some semblance of security measures and not make fraud easy-peasy, segregation of duties is pretty darn important – wouldn’t you agree?
