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Angelo Berlingieri
  • Ownership
  • Financial controls
  • Process improvement

My own $10m mistake, and the check that stopped it happening again

Role
Financial Analyst
Company
Baker Hughes
When
Feb to Mar 2021
Tools
Excel
caught
$10m
reported
Same day
repeats
0

Before

  • Billing spreadsheets checked by eye
  • A missing line could slip through unnoticed

After

  • An automatic check flags any missing line before billing
  • Built into the billing template, still in use when I left in 2024

01The problem

A few months into the job, I prepared the bills our Italian headquarters sent to the Australian branch for work on its contracts. Those bills became the branch's costs, so a missing line meant its numbers were wrong. In February 2021 I found that a copy-paste slip in my own spreadsheet had left out about $10m of costs. Nothing had flagged it, and the spreadsheet looked as tidy as ever.

My job was to put the numbers right, and make sure that kind of mistake couldn't slip through again.

02What I did

  • Owned up the same day. I told my finance manager straight away, then went to the regional finance managers myself, before they found out some other way.
  • Built a simple check. A formula ties the total billed back to the total cost, so any missing line shows up as a difference before anything goes out.
  • Put it in the template. I added the check to the billing template, so every bill after that ran through it.

03What changed

  • The missing costs were billed at the March quarterly close, a month later.
  • The mistake never happened again.
  • The check was still in the billing template when I left in 2024.
I didn't just fix the number. I changed the template so the same mistake was much harder to make.