Paying the price of expensive keyboard errors

We all make mistakes. We’re human. It happens. And that’s often how we learn.

Blunders occur when we’re behind a PC too. How many of us have sent an email to the wrong person – or failed to double-check something before we hit ‘Send’ … and then groaned afterwards. Hopefully any damage done is minimal.

But that wasn’t the case for major fashion retailer Supergroup (the company behind Superdry), according to reports in the past week. A ‘plus’ was entered in the accounts instead of ‘minus’.

The "arithmetic error" was worth £2.5m, noted the BBC. More bad news followed. Stocks plummeted by nearly 40% as shocked investors reacted to the news, say media reports.

Of course, until the robots take over, human error will always be part of everyday life and business. But it’s good to keep errors to a minimum where it’s do-able.

Electronic invoicing (e-invoicing) is a great example. Manual re-keying of paper invoices into the system (where errors naturally occur sometimes) can be replaced by a hands-free, highly-automated process that maximises accuracy. It’s faster, costs less and staff can be redeployed to tasks that add more value to the business.

And there’s a raft of follow-on benefits too …

• Decision-makers get a clearer picture of spending in near to real time – because financial data enters the system faster and with greater accuracy.
• Admin time resolving errors can be minimised, so there’s another saving.
• And suppliers get paid on time, rather than experiencing delays because of any re-keying mistakes.

Put simply, e-invoicing represents a big plus without a minus.