Page 53 - A Banker Down the Rabbit Hole

12. No one liked monitoring

I took charge for the Day Book and Personnel Administration

Department at this branch. For long, this was a problem
department as the Day Book took 5 to 7 days to tally and there
was a big lag with deadlines of Management Information System
(MIS) required by Head Office. This area had deteriorated and was
attracting adverse comments from the higher office. The Chief Manager
told me that we would have to improve the Day Book tallying on daily
basis. Going by my first interaction with him on estimating the time to
complete the employee profiling task, he perhaps trusted me more than
before. He assured me his full support to bring an improvement.

I found it very amusing that the staff member writing Day Book used a
refill, not the ball point pen and that too with his left hand to write the
Day Book. He was seriously engaged in tallying of the Day Book but due
to several small and bigger errors in many other functional departments,
there was a lag against a norm of zero day pendency. This could have
resulted in under reporting of business figures on the appointed date and
detection of serious errors including fraud, if committed by customers
or the staff.

Once that assistant went on leave for a week. I got another staff member
to work on the Day Book. I started noting down the mistakes (of each
department on daily basis) that led to delay in balancing the Day Book.
I found that there was general carelessness on part of staff as well as
supervising officers who actually were expected to detect errors and
make sure that staff follows the laid down process of accounting and
recording all the transactions during the day.

50 | A Banker down the Rabbit Hole