Long before Europe switched to the Euro as their currency we had a multitude of currencies and as a consequence even more exchange rates. At that time I worked as a computer programmer, mainly concerned with travel agencies. For one customer we needed to build an interface with their financial system.

The travel system we built was used for both booking and keeping (virtual) stock, like pre-ordered hotel rooms and plane seats. Every invoice, either selling or buying needed to be forwarded to the financial system with each detail replicated.

The difficult part at time was the implementation of their accounts system and budget codes. That was rather detailed, each hotel having both an own account and budget codes based on dates and destination. It was a huge undertake and we needed three large test runs and refinement sessions with accounting before we had our all systems go.

During that time I sat a lot with accounting and had lots of conversations and shared sessions feeding both the systems with the correct accounts and budget codes. Finally there was one table to be filled, the exchange rates table. We had of course had this set up with most exchange rates against the Dutch guilder.

Almost all, it was late and I noticed we did not cover the Icelandic króna. Not to worry said their accountant, typed 50,000 to 1 and told me they never had any transaction that currency, ever.

The first months of the systems running live was a huge success, and the company was happy, their accounting system though over-detailed ran without a problem, all the work and testing paid off.

That was until that day when a person booked an Icelandic hotel for 4 nights. The nightly batch converted the Icelandic króna into guilders and transported that amount to finance.

We were long gone from working at the customers office, we had new clients to attend to. When I arrived at our own office that morning, my manager, on the phone with some customer, called me into his office, his hand on the mute button. He asked me to close the door so he could put it on speaker phone. “You must hear this” he said with half a smile on his face, but also a bit worried. He told the other party that I was going to listen in and if he could repeat the problem very briefly. “The short story is, we are broke! I need to pay an invoice of over 6 million guilders to some hotel.” My eyes grew wide, how? What? “So who is the lucky receiver?” I asked after some silence. “Would you believe it’s located in Reykjavik?” He responded. I thought for a while because the details of our interface were not on top of my mind. “O I see” I responded. And then laughed very hard and very loud. “So it finally happened”

As the accountant did not want this error turn up in his books in any way, a corrective booking on that account was out of the question. Client is King, so I drove off after it was confirmed that we would re-run the invoice run and interface again after we restored the financial system to one day before. It took me the rest of the day to have all previous days work reflow through the systems. Accountants happy, my manager happy, and only their accountant and some IT guys were ever aware that they were broke for a day.