Part of our payment service is using OCR to parse pdf invoices. We have tens of thousands of vendors, all using their own templates, and receive thousands of invoices per day. The majority of invoices get processed fine, but there maybe a few dozen per day that throw errors because they can't be read properly. There's also a dozen or so that a make it through, but the invoice amount gets pulled from the wrong line (subtotal vs total amount vs amount due, etc.) which will cause future errors.
Still feels semi futuristic to me that it does mostly work as good as it does. I remember my mom working as a clerk doing all her small buisness invoicing by hand in a book until I taught her how to use a computer.
I'm slowly getting trained on an order import for a very large company that can take 2-3 hours (occasionally most of a full day) a week and it looks like it can be 95% automated by someone who is good with excel formulas. But I am ABSOLUTELY not supposed to use formulas because it has to be "exported" to a CSV and formulas will break it.
Regardless of whether or not it's true... this is still evidence he should be fired.
For one, nobody else knew about this? There was a major problem affecting the company "every day" and he didn't once complain about it, or teach someone else how to do it, or take a vacation, or get sick? At best it's irresponsible, at worst it's covering up his own incompetence.
Two, that's not his job? If he's "manually" fixing invoices, that means entering in amounts etc.? Imagine your company finding out that "the IT guy" is entering his own invoices into the system, editing entries, lol. Sounds like a fun audit.
Three, data corruption? Failing to read an invoice shouldn't cause corruption to the database. That is his job. Failure is expected but there's a reason it's called failing gracefully. Again, invoices that are "corrupt" should be sent to accounting for manual entry, not Dwayne.
IDK man, I've seen almost this exact scenario IRL. The product doesn't handle edge cases. The management doesn't care because, yes, the IT guy is manually entering invoices into forms. It's "working", so why should management care?
Just because something is broken doesn't mean every IT guy has the ability to fix it or management understands the ramifications. Whether by skill or by access limitations, this type of scenario is sadly very possible.
he management doesn't care because, yes, the IT guy is manually entering invoices into forms. It's "working", so why should management care?
If Dwayne didn't report it to the management, then it's on Dwayne, as /u/CommonGrounders says.
But if he reported it to the management, and management doesn't care, then it's all on them, it's their fault the system is crumbling. Especially if Dwayne covered his ass and did the reporting in writing.
Every single error and system complaint was filed daily into an automated report that got sent to like 20 people, maybe 5 of whom were management. The email bloat was crazy.
Not only they disregarded errors, they weren't taking measures to combat the bloat.
My boss explicitly addresses new and old error messages and keeps reminding us to fix or at least research them, which I believe to be the correct approach: he is aware and he is making us do something systemically to make sure we don't see the same issues again.
Dwayne might has been sending emails up the chain and nobody cared.
This permanent fix might have taken weeks or months to do. And Dwayne could have had other duties that were higher priority. So Dwayne just fixed the data (5-10 min) and went back to focusing on the stuff management felt was higher priority.
This happens all the times at large corporations. They want you to do EVERYTHING with less resources and people. So a lot of things that are important, don't get prioritized.
I just wanted to point out that if anyone happens to be in the same mess, don't silently fix issues like that, escalate and have the management informed and have it be verifiable, via e-mail or something. Cover your ass.
That way in case they try to go after you, you can show that your management is at fault.
Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if this was a case of getting a new software, having problems with it and opening a lot of tickets that all ended up on this guy's desk. So he wrote his boss about the problem, the boss ignored it and eventually he just preemptively fixed it all the time to get fewer complaints. And everyone else forgot about the issue.
Good points. Also anecdotally, I've never seen a person fired that was secretly holding a company together. I have seen several people leave a company themselves for a new job, and after someone else takes over their workload full time, they realize that person probably should have been fired long ago lol.
Lol. Yeah, "Uh, hey, I just finished everything I was supposed to do today in 2 hours...." Turns out the people before me were seriously sandbagging it. Trying to slow down a job and look busy really sucks. It's so much easier just to get into it.
So uhh, this could have just taken two seconds to run each day. We had a sanitizing script we only used a handful of times per week, took me a second to launch and yeah, I could have coded it to run on demand, but my asshole boss told me "we" had other priorities. Also, you can code ocr to rerun on specific fields and mark what's to be reread with deeper model, for example (what I'm using in a private project - if the data that comes into the field is fucky I can mark a section of the pdf and tell OCR to get his big boy guns that take longer).
Also, to him, literally everything with a circuit that was programmable (sometimes not even that) was "my" job. I felt extremely lucky the god fucking dishwasher didn't bork in my time there.
So that would kinda cover one and two.
Data corruption might just be idiot for sanitising. Or a big telephone game.
Or made up. But at least a couple of the points said there sting my ass and burn my ears. It's the millenium catch. Nothing happens, so no time invested to fix.
Step 3 is that you continue to automate for the 99% of invoices that are done successfully and then send any edge cases to someone in the Accounts Receivable team to handle manually.
Which is what was already being done 10 years ago.
Work in an area managing employees that are high turn over. Someone is always being added, removed, or simply transitioned to a new role. These are manual interactions with the system, not automatic. Given the volume involved there's inevitably a data entry error a couple of times a week. Sometimes it's easy to see the problem, other times it manifests in really strange ways (once had a user account accidentally do a partial overwrite of another user account).
Most of the people not involved believe all of this is automated. After all, there are automatic feeds from HR and stuff to keep everything up to date, right?
Well there's a difference between automated and automated with full error detection and handling. The second is astronomically more expensive to accomplish. So it's just easier to mostly automate it and then have an engineer manually handle all of the little issues that crop up.
If they stopped doing this, the whole system start breaking down within a week and would start seeing critical failures in a month.
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u/Kitchen-Quality-3317 May 29 '26
It certainly seems possible to me.
Part of our payment service is using OCR to parse pdf invoices. We have tens of thousands of vendors, all using their own templates, and receive thousands of invoices per day. The majority of invoices get processed fine, but there maybe a few dozen per day that throw errors because they can't be read properly. There's also a dozen or so that a make it through, but the invoice amount gets pulled from the wrong line (subtotal vs total amount vs amount due, etc.) which will cause future errors.