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I put the wrong check amount on a $340,000 wire and nobody caught it but me
Two years ago I was working as an AP clerk at a small HVAC company in Reno and I was the last person in the office on a Friday afternoon. We had a vendor in Sparks who did all our sheet metal and I was pushing through a wire for $340,000 to cover three months of invoices. I typed the amount in the bank portal, hit submit, and then the confirmation screen popped up showing the exact same number in both spots, just written out differently, and something felt off. I pulled the paper invoice and realized I had transposed two digits, so I had actually sent $430,000. My stomach dropped. The bank had already accepted it and it was past their cutoff, which meant it would sit until Monday. I called my boss at 6:15 on a Friday night and told him what happened, and he just went quiet for like 10 seconds. We spent the whole weekend on the phone with the bank and the vendor, and thankfully the vendor wired the $90,000 back on Tuesday after their AR girl confirmed the invoices only totaled $340K. My boss never wrote me up but he did make me start double checking every wire with a second set of eyes from that point on. The part that still gets me is that no system we had in place would have caught it, only that weird feeling I got from the confirmation screen. Has anyone else caught a screw up right at the last second like that?
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