AS KARL MARX once said, life has very few privileges for the workers so you have to take them whenever you can. Or was that Harry Redknapp? Anyway, by all accounts the grafters at Blaminio plc's brewing subsidiary certainly know how to wring the odd "employee benefit" or two out of the system down at their warehouse... The stock control account for Old Fustier Finest Ales (OFFA) is kept on an old and trusty spreadsheet. And one of the many tasks that befell me last year was to keep the thing bang up to date (ie, no more than a period or two behind). Naturally, I moaned about it. Just because the management accountant at OFFA was still getting his grey head around his Casio FX-100, let alone Excel, that's no reason to dump it on me. True, I was able spin the job out to fill one whole Tuesday every month. But really, once I'd updated the creaky formulae bequeathed to me by my useless predecessor and found out who to call for the various 14 bits of info required – amounts brewed, dispatched, sold, returned, spoils, blah blah blah – it really could have been done by your average 16¬year-old. Or even the HR director.

In fact, the trickiest part was deciding how to treat... well, how can I put it? No, there's no subtle way: the beverage that went home in the back of the warehousemen's cars every other week. The first time I jockeyed this particular spreadsheet, I rang the warehouse manager in a fair panic: the stock figure was seven barrels short! "This is clearly a major scam," I told him. "I'm on the brink of ringing the Serious Fraud Office!" I don't think I've been spoken to quite so threateningly in my life.

Anyway, I got the point (have you seen the forearms on those guys in the yard?). They're not exactly fat cats down there, and the occasional barrel is a well-understood perk. The marketing director gets an SL 55 AMG; they get the odd drink. It's a centuries-old tradition, I'm told. So I'd been quietly accommodating the "missing" barrels (ie. writing them off in the stock control worksheet manually) ever since. Result? Me and the warehouse manager were now great mates. He even, ahem, bought me the odd pint.

All this was no problem° until Old Fustier's auditors recommended a shiny new financial accounts system (SNFAS). Call me naive, but this didn't seem to be my problem at the time. The last I saw of it was the 75-page questionnaire from the systems consultants "gathering relevant data on implementation and transference issues". Naturally, I ignored it. Which was the wrong answer.

All hell broke loose after the year end. The group FD and the auditor took a look at the new system's stock account. Evidently, no-one had checked it before (surprise, surprise) and no-one could understand what was going on. Of course, I knew immediately where the problem was, so I went straight into the FD's office to tell him all about... my imminent need for a couple of days off – discretion being the better part of audit findings and all that. For old times' sake, I did manage to get in a call to the guys in the warehouse on my way out. Now control procedures are being tightened up across the board. So it looks like another workers' perk may be on its way out- at least until the CCTV is turned away from the side entrance, anyway. That's the problem with clever software. It has no way of writing off the discrepancies between actual stock and the level of stock. It just keeps on accumulating. And things aren't helped by the fact everyone either ignores it or doesn't understand what the figure is telling them. They're reliant on the "intelligence" of the system. As you can imagine, the net result can be a little sticky.

I'd rather have my spreadsheet software – combined with my own cunning "wetware". And so would my mates who used to pop round to help me drink the barrel which appeared at my back door once every couple of months.