Expecting a peaceful day
“I want a payment made. It shouldn’t take more than a request via email. Make the transfer at the bank. Nothing complicated”. Then you hit “send” to send the email and accounting will handle the rest. You informed the supplier. She is happy. Life moves on. All done.
How naïve…
Weeks later, the supplier calls asking for the payment you ensured she would receive a couple of weeks ago. Confused, you reach out to accounting, who tells you they are missing an authorisation from your side. You answer you already sent an email, but that apparently is not enough. You need to log in the system, find a certain application and approve something you were not sure you had to approve. All sorted.
A month later, the supplier calls again, not that friendly. Again, you check with accounting what is happening. The invoice you want to pay has a high amount and now somebody else needs to approve it. That one is your supervisor, so you contact her to follow the same steps as before.
Not only does she need time to do it, as she is involved in meetings all the time. At some point, she does what she has to do. Then, not so confident this time, ask accounting what is the status. Now they tell you everything is fine and you need to ask treasury.
Oh my God…
You send another email, this time with a lot of people in copy, to put more pressure. However, treasury, happily answers you that the next payment run will take place in another week.
Sweating, because you do not know what to say to the supplier, you end up avoiding any email, phone calls, overthinking what your answer might be, even asking AI to help you draft an answer to avoid an escalation, fearing that the supplier might stop doing business with you and you may be held accountable for it.
If you have been working in corporate probably you might have faced a situation like this.
The Bureaucracy
In companies, especially in Corporate, it is quite common that simple transactions require a lot of intermediary steps and authorisations. This is part of the spectrum of internal controls of a company -click here to learn more about it-.
In our story, the supplier got paid in the end, fortunately, and nothing else happened. However, it can be stressful for employees, suppliers and the business as well, especially when these controls are not clear, despite they are necessary, which can delay things further and cause more stress.
Who is responsible for this?
In a nutshell, everyone has their part of responsibility, from the top to the bottom. However, this could be a long discussion. In the end, what matters here is that business can be done in an agile, but in a safe way to avoid errors or frauds, despite the challenge.
Have you ever got yourself in a situation like this with other departments? I would like to hear your thoughts.
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