The Contoso Convergence, Episode 6: The Ghost in AP
An Advanced Dungeons & Dynamics 365 session. Episode 6 of 14.
Previously on: Episode 5, One Hour, the party fixed the integration that had been silently feeding the shadow ledger, and discovered the real problem was a five minute config fix hiding behind three weeks of assumed complexity.
Fixing one thing tends to reveal the next thing. That’s not bad luck. It’s what happens when you finally have clean data to look through instead of a mess to guess at. This episode, the party gets its first real look at what’s underneath everything else, and finds something that’s been there a lot longer than three weeks.
The Session
GM: The integration fix holds. Landed cost posts clean. The room exhales for the first time in five episodes.
Sable: Don’t relax yet. Validating the postings surfaced something else. There’s a recurring accrual in AP. Same amount, every month, for eighteen months. It posts to a suspense account and just sits there.
Thorne: Vendor?
Sable: Vendor code is a placeholder. “VEND TEMP 01.”
Marge: Another TEMP. Of course.
Ai. Cassiopeia: I cross referenced the amount against the vendor rebate program from the original ASC 606 transition. It matches a rebate structure that was supposed to be automated and never was.
Vex: So someone’s been manually estimating a rebate accrual for a vendor that might not even be configured right, for a year and a half, and just letting it sit in suspense?
Priya’s replacement (a nervous analyst named Oskar): That was me. I inherited it from Priya’s predecessor. Nobody told me to stop.
The room turns toward Oskar, who has been standing quietly near the door for most of the conversation, clearly hoping nobody would ask.
Marge: How does a manual accrual survive eighteen months and two go live attempts without anyone flagging it?
Oskar: (quietly) Because it closes clean every month. The number’s never wildly wrong. It’s just never provably right, either. Nobody’s ever had time to check.
Sable: (gently) You weren’t hiding this.
Oskar: I didn’t think I was allowed to raise it. I’m not senior enough to say the automated process was never built.
Ai. Cassiopeia: For the record, this is not a criticism of Oskar’s work. His estimation methodology is, if anything, unusually disciplined for a manual process running this long.
Thorne pulls up the original rebate contract terms. The numbers on the page do not match the numbers in the suspense account. Not by a little.
Thorne: Oskar. Whatever you were estimating against, it isn’t this contract.
The person doing the invisible work
Every implementation eventually finds an Oskar. Someone junior enough that they inherited a broken process rather than built it, and senior enough to keep it running competently for eighteen months without anyone above them noticing there was a problem at all. That combination, competent enough to hide the gap, junior enough to feel like they can’t raise it, is exactly what lets a process like this survive two failed go live attempts.
This isn’t a story about someone cutting corners. It’s the opposite. Oskar’s discipline is the reason nobody noticed sooner. A sloppier manual process would have thrown obviously wrong numbers and gotten caught in month two. A careful one, run by someone paying close attention every single month, can close clean for a year and a half while quietly drifting further and further from the actual contract terms underneath it.
The real failure here happened before Oskar ever touched the spreadsheet. Somewhere in the original ASC 606 transition, a line item for rebate automation didn’t get built, and instead of that gap showing up as a flagged risk, it got quietly absorbed by whoever happened to be sitting in the AP seat at the time. That’s the pattern worth naming: work that should have been a system’s job becomes a person’s invisible responsibility, and the person doing it often doesn’t feel like they have standing to say so out loud.
What happens next
The numbers on the contract and the numbers in the suspense account don’t match, and now the party has to figure out how far off they actually are, eighteen months deep, with go live four weeks away and a steering committee that’s about to start asking pointed questions about why the timeline hasn’t moved.
Next episode: Episode 7, The Steering Committee (coming soon)
If there’s a process on your team that’s being quietly kept alive by someone who doesn’t feel senior enough to flag it, this episode is for them too. Gamifying the Enterprise: Game Mechanics for Continuous Proficiency is available now on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GY3VWLVX
And if you want to build the kind of system where gaps like this get caught in month two instead of month eighteen, start here: adnd365.com/start
A Tinkerers Notebook 