Getting my sums right

I have spent a large part of my day sat at my computer trying to get my accounts to balance ... and I finally managed it!

My day started with a trip to the branch of the bank that holds my business account ... and before anyone asks, it is part of the banking group that has been having all the problems with its computer system!

(For the benefit of regular blog readers from outside the UK, one of the major banking groups in the UK – the NatWest Bank, the Royal Bank of Scotland, and the Ulster Bank – has been unable to get its computer system to process all account transactions for five days. This has left businesses unable to pay their staff, people unable to get money out of ATMs, and – in some cases – not be able to move house on the day they were supposed to. The banks have stayed open for extended hours since the problem began and even opened on Sunday morning to try to help customers who were having problems.)

I eventually managed to pay money into the business's bank account (something that took far longer than normal) and after returning home for some lunch, I began to sort out my business and personal accounts and – more importantly – the end-of-year accounts for Wargame Developments. They are all set up on MS Excel spreadsheets, and it usually takes less than an hour to do the lot ... but not today!

It took me less than thirty minutes to get my business and personal accounts up to date and reconciled, but for some reason I just could not get the Wargame Developments accounts to balance. They were 45p out.

Now most people would not worry about 45p ... but my father trained as an accountant after his service in the Army, and he drummed into me from an early age that accounts must balance. As the amount was 45p – and was thus divisible by 9 – it was likely that I had transposed two digits when entering an amount. A cursory look through the accounts showed no obvious errors, so I had to go through every single transaction since the last reconciliation to find the mistake. The problem was that I could not find it.

After two hours of fruitless work I took a break, but even coming back to the problem somewhat refreshed did not immediately yield an answer. I finally decided to check each calculation manually ... something that should not be necessary if the spreadsheet has been set up correctly.

I found the answer after almost two more hours of looking ... and it was something that I had never come across before. One of the calculations on the spreadsheet was producing an incorrect result, but when I checked the formula I could find nothing obviously wrong with it. I deleted the existing formula and typed it in again ... and the correct answer appeared. I have no idea why this happened ... but it did ... and the 45p error had disappeared.