3 Excel Mistakes that Could Ruin An HR’s Career

Especially in an economy like the Philippines, losing your job can be a nightmare. Finding work is always an uphill battle so we hold onto our current employment for as long as we possibly can. For HR’s, it’s the same thing but it might come with more risks in the form of an unassumingly apathetic spreadsheet. A lot of things can go wrong with an HR’s job, most of them happen on Excel, and some of them can be career-ending.

Bad: Messing Up Schedules

There are a lot of reasons why you shouldn’t plan attendance on Excel like we’ve mentioned in a previous article. While messing up a schedule can be fixable for some industries, there are other industries that rely on seamless scheduling to stay afloat. Industries like health care, basic needs transportation, and manufacturing are some of these industries. They are so reliant on impeccably planned schedules because, literally, lives depend on it.

As an HR, if you mess up the schedule for an advertising company, one wrong day can’t be catastrophic. However, let’s say you’re an HR for a construction company, and you mess up a schedule for a safety officer. When an accident happens and a safety officer isn’t around because of a “little error” you made, that could be enough to jeopardize your job.

You need a system that has a collaborative scheduling system that helps ensure critical people are present at every critical moment.

Worse: Sending a Sensitive Sheet to the Wrong Recipient

One of the biggest issues that Excel has is its lack of shareability. Your best way to share sheets is by saving and sending data. If you are a company that works on HR for attendance, it’s likely that you’re constantly generating attendance data and then sending it over to payroll. For the payroll team, it could be the same way. They need to corroborate the attendance data, generate payroll information and then send that to finance for payout.

But the devil is always in the details. One wrong typo can mean recipient J.Torre can become J.Torres. These mistakes really happen in real life. While a mistake like this can only potentially end your career, it will haunt your 201 for the rest of your stay with the company and even when you transfer.

Companies need a more secure way of relaying sensitive HR information like attendance, payroll, leave, and payout.

Nightmare: One Bad Formula

It sounds so simple but this one takes the cake as the worst thing that can possibly kill an HR’s career. There are so many horror stories of Excel being able to take down even big companies with a simple mistake. If Excel can ruin big companies, there’s no reason to believe that it won’t ruin your career. One such way is with a simple but irredeemable formula. In one of our stories, a company was in hot water for 3 years because of one simple mistake in the disbursement computation.

“That won’t happen to me” you keep thinking but with DOLE being very pro-employee, if you miscompute salary wrongly, that wrong formula could turn into lawsuit. Believe us and other HRs when we claim that it rarely goes well for the company, or for the HR that makes the mistake.

Systems need to be able to process such data seamlessly to make sure that there’s minimal human error. Even if such system errors occur (which rarely do), it won’t be on you—even the company has less liability too!

Try a system that won’t put your career at risk. Sign up for a free trial today and see how much career security and peace of mind a good attendance and payroll system can afford you.