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Business owners have to focus on their main efforts, but it is also important to get things like payroll done correctly.

What would you do if you worked for the help desk at a payroll software company, and a doctor called in demanding assistance with his new setup, saying that he was supposed to get money out to his employees yesterday?

That is what happened to the support desk worker in this story, so he tried to figure out how the guy messed things up and get it fixed so he could get the workers paid.

His employees must have been very upset since he already missed the payroll deadline. Read through the full story here and see what you think.

“I’m a doctor and I have patients to see. I don’t have time to set up the payroll software I bought today to pay my employees the money I owe them yesterday.”

I work in tech support for a popular accounting and payroll software package.

Let’s get into what happened.

I have a lot of silly stories that make little sense outside of the accounting world, plus some simple favorites like “You sold my privileged financial data to a third party and I’m suing you,” but I had one today that I found amusing enough to share.

Customer: I am unable to run payroll because the system is giving me an error when I add an employee.

Me: What is the error?

New software is always difficult to set up.

Customer: (ignores question) Hey, I have like 40 terminated employees in the system that I need to delete. Can you delete them for me?

Me: I can do that (looks up account….) Looks like you imported a ton of terminated employees into the payroll software, which you just bought today and integrated with your existing accounting software.

All these extra employees are clogging things up.

The terminated employees were missing most of their information and there are duplicates all over the place. Also, many of them can’t be deleted because you have payroll information already linked to them.

We require you to manually reassign or delete those transactions so you don’t, you know, accidentally delete an employee with 5 years of payroll information and mess up your taxes (paraphrase).

He is going to have to make time.

Customer: Fixing all of the transactions I imported is too time consuming. I have no staff to do this for me. Can you add the employee for me so I can run payroll?

Me: Yes, and do you still want the 40 employees deleted? Note that they are terminated and have no effect on your current ability to run payroll and you can always do this later.

Customer: Yes I want them deleted immediately but I don’t have time to do the steps you said.

What did this guy do?

Me: Why did you import all of that information that you didn’t need, such as the 40 terminated employees?

Customer: I didn’t do it. The employees were there before I imported.

Me: (checks logs. They weren’t. I changed the subject) Let’s get this employee added so you can run payroll! (encounters duplication error, checks on common reason for the error) Looks like you have that employee already set up as a contractor. Are they a contractor, an employee, or both?

Does he think they got magically set up this way?

Customer: They were never a contractor. I didn’t put them in as a contractor.

Me: (Skips the instruction to delete the contractor because he has payroll history and that was a dead end before) I’ll rename the contractor John Doe2 so I can add them as an employee.

At least it is working now.

Customer: OK it worked and I ran payroll for yesterday, thanks!

Mysteries to solve: Why is the customer a doctor who does not have an administrative assistant?

A lot of questions remain unanswered.

Why did the doctor import all of his old payroll information if he didn’t want it, why did he think it was there before, and why on earth would he want to delete it?

Why was the one employee in the system as a contractor, and why does he have a payroll history? Why did the business owner wait until payroll was a day late to do anything about it?

This is an accountant’s nightmare.

Why did he not handwrite his checks if the old payroll system was not working for him? Why were there so many duplicates in the old payroll system, all with individual and unique payroll history?

How the heck is this guy going to do his taxes?

Customers can be the worst sometimes. It is clear that this guy didn’t know what he was doing, but he wanted it fixed fast.

Let’s see what the people in the comments have to say about it.

This commenter has some questions.

Maybe they were from the past.

They may be smart, but not about everything.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an employee who was denied a raise for “not being dedicated enough,” but then went on to discover what was really going on behind the scenes.

This commenter is spot on.

He is going to pay a mint to an accountant.

He should have set this up weeks ago, or else run payroll on the old system. Not paying your employees on time is never acceptable.

Fortunately, they were able to get the issues figured out.