I gave her £470, and £570 appeared in my account, woo!

A mate of mine did the same thing a few years ago and gave someone an extra £100. He realised who had given the extra to but had to leave it, he didn't lose his job but this was 10 years ago.
 
gord said:
Counter errors should show at the end of the day, not the morning. The processed voucher will surely show as £570 as that is what the cashier has entered into the system, yet the till only has £470 in, which gives the £100 discrepancy, which as long as the cashier cant specifically remember doing wrongly (which it will be very hard to do) then they wont be able to identify his account as the one with the discrepancy. As far as the systems are concerned they should show £570 in the account and £570 cash paid in.
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I think gord speaketh the truth.

The OP has a receipt for £570 being paid in and as far as the bank are concerned that's what he paid in (as long as he didn't fill out a paying in slip for £470 which I don't believe he did).

There is a 0% chance of the girl losing her job over this 1 incident so anybody telling the OP to think of the poor girl is very misguided. Sure she'll fell bad at being £100 under (if she cares about her job) but that's as far as it'll go.

As for giving the money back, if I'd noticed at the time that she'd credited my account too much then I would have said something but I couldn't honestly say that I'd take the trouble to go back in the next day and rectify things. I may do but doubt it if the situation arose.
 
Majago said:
As for giving the money back, if I'd noticed at the time that she'd credited my account too much then I would have said something but I couldn't honestly say that I'd take the trouble to go back in the next day and rectify things. I may do but doubt it if the situation arose.
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Pretty much the same thoughts as me.
 
I once got 3 free bags of food at a mcdonalds restaurant because the girl brought us the wrong orders, she'd brought over something ridiculous like 3 bigmacs, 2 double 1/4 pounders, a load of fries, nuggets and a selection of drinks. I urged my friend to leave the parking bay and car park immediately and we made a hastey get-away after order 2 double cheesburgers between us.

I think i'd probably do the same thing in this situation as well. Big company loses out small time because of human error. I've made mistakes before and i'm sure theres thousands of others that have too.

Just keep it on one side for a bit incase they ask for it back.
 
gord said:
Counter errors should show at the end of the day, not the morning. The processed voucher will surely show as £570 as that is what the cashier has entered into the system, yet the till only has £470 in, which gives the £100 discrepancy, which as long as the cashier cant specifically remember doing wrongly (which it will be very hard to do) then they wont be able to identify his account as the one with the discrepancy. As far as the systems are concerned they should show £570 in the account and £570 cash paid in.
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Depends on the bank and the systems they use. If they use iPSL which most of the big banks do then i presume the systems are all very similar. I work for HSBC btw.

To answer how they would know, in the morning we get a counter errors report complete with images and lists. On one piece there would be an 'Amount posted voucher not received' showing £570cr into an account with no corresponding paperwork. It would flag the sort code and account no. A second error 'Voucher received amount not posted' would show the credit slip for the account. This would then be matched off by the cashier, £570dr from customers account passed as a real-time debit and £470 passed as a real-time credit.

Counter errors are not my forte but this is a simple enough case for even me to do!
 
sod it keep the money the bank does over millions of people in the uk a year so i think they can afford 100 quid i wouldn't even think about not keeping it they have enough money
 
Kitchster_uk said:
Depends on the bank and the systems they use. If they use iPSL which most of the big banks do then i presume the systems are all very similar. I work for HSBC btw.

To answer how they would know, in the morning we get a counter errors report complete with images and lists. On one piece there would be an 'Amount posted voucher not received' showing £570cr into an account with no corresponding paperwork. It would flag the sort code and account no. A second error 'Voucher received amount not posted' would show the credit slip for the account. This would then be matched off by the cashier, £570dr from customers account passed as a real-time debit and £470 passed as a real-time credit.

Counter errors are not my forte but this is a simple enough case for even me to do!
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Fair enough, ive never worked with those systems so i dont know. But if its anything like when i was a cashier, its as i explained.

But i am intrigued as to how this system works if the tills work as i assume, all cash goes into till. How do you know the £100 difference is for a specific account when surely all paperwork states that £570 has been paid. Surely in the systems eyes that account was credited £570 and the system has no idea how much cash was actually physically accepted at that time, which is the responsibility of the cashier and thus the human error is derived.
 
If you reverse the situation - the bank writes down and gives you a receipt for £370 but actually has the full £470, I bet they wouldn't be honest enough to give you your £100 back. You'd have no proof at all - and they'd tell you you should've checked the receipt.
 
Kitchster_uk said:
To answer how they would know, in the morning we get a counter errors report complete with images and lists. On one piece there would be an 'Amount posted voucher not received' showing £570cr into an account with no corresponding paperwork. It would flag the sort code and account no. A second error 'Voucher received amount not posted' would show the credit slip for the account. This would then be matched off by the cashier, £570dr from customers account passed as a real-time debit and £470 passed as a real-time credit
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I'd assume by voucher/credit slip, you mean paying in slip? Of which apparently there was none - so surely this error would never show.

As gord says, the cashier believed they counted £570 and put £570 in the till. They probably carried out a tonne of other transactions that day and couldn't possibly have any way of finding out which transaction caused a £100 error.
 
gord said:
But i am intrigued as to how this system works if the tills work as i assume, all cash goes into till. How do you know the £100 difference is for a specific account when surely all paperwork states that £570 has been paid. Surely in the systems eyes that account was credited £570 and the system has no idea how much cash was actually physically accepted at that time, which is the responsibility of the cashier and thus the human error is derived.
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Our tills work like this:

A 'real-time' cash transaction. You give the cashier £470 and a credit slip - this is our check. The cashier counts the cash and sticks it in the till. THey the enter a 'cash credit transaction' on their machine to tell the till they've put £470 in. In error, they tell it £570 was put in. Nothing happens now until either the till is balanced or the 'credit' slip is processed that night. W'll assume the latter.

All the 'real-time' work gets sent off sealed in an orange bag to a clearing house called iPSL - I use bradford but there are several. The credit slip is put, with the rest of the days work, into a big machine that reads it. It then checks for a corresponding transaction in the account - paid in at branch 40-xx-xx, into s/c 40-12-34 a/c 12345678 for £470. It doesn't find this and kicks the voucher out which is duly sent back to branch as 'voucher received, amount not posted' exception. The system ends it's run and a second exception is created as £570 transaction into 40-12-34 12345678 does not have a corresponding credit in the days work, thus a 'amount posted, voucher not received' is created and returned to branch.

A nice red & grey bag arrives back in the morning with these two bits of paper in and the cashiers take a look. The image of the credit slip shows £470 but £570 has been posted to the account by mistake. The cashier then reverses the £570 and puts through the appropriate transaction of £470. 'Dummy' credits and debits are created to keep the machine happy that night.

Sounds complex and it is, but it helps remove counter errors like this. Just to let you all know, you're just as likely to have something debit twice or for to much and then the it becomes more obvious that the system is there for the protection of the customer.

Tills are mostly 'pooled' anyway now so they can be shared between many people on any one day. Gone are the aysof having your own I'm afraid.
 
csmager said:
I'd assume by voucher/credit slip, you mean paying in slip? Of which apparently there was none - so surely this error would never show.

As gord says, the cashier believed they counted £570 and put £570 in the till. They probably carried out a tonne of other transactions that day and couldn't possibly have any way of finding out which transaction caused a £100 error.
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What's your gripe with the banks??? The only people I find having a go in my line of work are those who don't see why the rules apply to them and then shout at me for that. Banks are public limited companies and are therefore responsible to their shareholders. Yes we make lots of money, but 1 in 3 people are now touched by HSBC in the UK, through pensions etc and if our stock goes down, a large amount of pesnion schemes suffer. Oh, as a UK PLC, HSBC pays several £BILLION in taxes, not easily replaced.

Finally, if a good customer of ours told me there had been £100 error and they were out of pocket, I'd balance the tills and if there was a single sniff that this was the case, I'd have it back in their account in a heartbeat. Oh, as a branch manager, I have done this before.
 
Got no real problem with banks - I just can't imagine they'd bend over backwards to rectify a mistake. Conversely, they make £billions per year in profit, so I doubt they'll really miss £100.

Refreshingly, someone from Barclays told my mother to move her money to a different bank as their interest rate on their savings account was crap. And HSBC have started being exceedingly helpful since they made me a Premier customer - it's certainly a lot easier to get things done now. Having someone's mobile number to ring if you need something sorting's quite a bonus.

Going back to the problem at hand, if there was no voucher/credit slip/paying in slip submitted with the payment, I still can't see how there's any way it could be traced.
 
Been with my bank for 20 yrs, they've always been brilliant, but just remeber they are out to get as much cash off you as possible. Hence they borrow off you ( your acct balance ) at a stupidly low interest rate. Then you borrow off them ( loans etc ) at about 1000% more interest.

The banks probably made 10 times more cash off you than they gave you by accident. By the time they've finished putting everyones acct details in bin bags at the back of the brance that night it would have all been forgotten.
 
Maybe she did a mini-balance prior to serving the OP and a further one some time afterwards, which would narrow down the number of potential deposits/withdrawals whereby the mistake could have occurred.

I work for a high street financial organisation, but not within the retail network, so I don't really know how our systems would handle it, to be honest.
 
newbidood said:
Been with my bank for 20 yrs, they've always been brilliant, but just remeber they are out to get as much cash off you as possible. Hence they borrow off you ( your acct balance ) at a stupidly low interest rate. Then you borrow off them ( loans etc ) at about 1000% more interest.
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You do realise that banking is just a little bit more complicated than that, right...? :rolleyes:
 
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