Should you tell your boss when you make a mistake?

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Small or large, making a mistake at work is always traumatizing.

First thought: Oh no, can I fix it without anyone knowing?

Second thought: Who does this affect and have they noticed?

Third thought: Oh, this is not good.

So, what do you do. Do you send a chat message or email to your boss and 'fess up right away or do you try to fix it.

It really depends on hard it is going to be to fix the mistake and who or what systems it affects.

Wrong account number on a journal entry that you just made: just fix it and move on.

Large wrong amount on a journal entry that you made two days ago: you're probably going to have to tell someone.

I have made many mistakes over my two decades of accounting. My approach has always been to fix the mistake and if it was material then I tell my boss. If I can't fix it without help, I would tell him and ask for help.

One time, I was copying a folder from the Corp drive to a local drive. Once I copied it, I deleted the files that did not pertain to me. A few weeks later, I realized I had moved the folder instead of copying it and everything I deleted was gone. I'm talking about multiple schedules from years prior. Some of the schedules were so old, nobody knew where they originated and definitely didn't know how to recreate them.

I started looking through every folder on the Corp drive that I could get into to see if the schedules had been saved somewhere else. Did not find anything. These schedules were from all over the company and the world, I thought I was going to have to call basically everyone to see if they had a copy of the schedules that pertained to them. That was going to be a lot of people and a lot of "I am so sorry".

Then it occurred to me, "What about IT? Can they restore the file before anybody realizes it is gone?" It took them a couple of days, but they found the folder and put it back on the Corp drive. Nobody noticed it was missing; nobody knew I had deleted it. I had gotten away with it. (evil laugh)

So, should I have told my boss when I first discovered the mistake or when I had fixed it? Did he really need to know, no harm, no foul?

I did end up telling him the next time I talked to him. "Hey boss, funny story."

How have you handled mistakes that you have made? If you were able to fix it, did you tell anyone?