>> Re-typing = madness - error prone
That's reminded me....
A couple of years either side of 1990 I was managing a cashier section in a small government agency. Two different legacy systems. One running in some ancient Kienzle machines, apart from giving me grey hairs over PAYE on a small pension payroll it ran OK.
The other used a legal accounting package called SOLACS which as was the way then was supplied with the hardware. Burroughs kit. Designed to be run without specialist IT skills but with manufacturer training and support by. By the time I inherited it the trained staff had moved on and support, following various mergers, was non existent. Eventually we handed the hardware over to the IT 'professionals' in their air conditioned den on the 4th floor. My staff ran the processes and keyed in payment/receipt data from handwritten forms authorised by responsible staff.
After one of its many breakdowns the 'professionals' restored the data from the back up tapes but used the wrong tape for one half of the data. Two or three working days later, including a Tuesday when we ran a weekly regular payments run people from the 'client' department were beating a path to my door reporting inconsistent account balances and what were reported as chain errors.
We had to re-key about a week's worth of work. The automated regular payments could be re-run but because of the balance differences and fact that it wouldn't make payments that resulted in a negative ledger balance on any account the run totals differed by several thousand. There were some differences in the keyed runs too but they were fairly easily reconciled.
I spent an entire weekend going through dot matrix printed reports identifying differences. A lot of the errors involved £150.00 as that was the maximum amount for cashable warrants. Eventually got it down to a manageable figure by Sunday night and finally found a couple of transpositions.
That was less than a week's work re input in a very small operation.
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