I see what you mean, Joyce, especially if we include the Tigress eating a cheetal outside my Lodge Room too! Coming back to the topic, you are absolutely right. Scaling and leveraging our business is easier if we have systems, processes and checks in place. Even if we operate at a sole proprietor level, documentation is crucial for business continuity in the event that we are not able to attend to our business and have to delegate certain online customer service tasks like sales of ebooks, programs and ensuring the money is in the bank. It makes things easier for the other person whom we may have delegated or employed to do the task.

Thanks Marquita. Awareness is important, especially as the business grows and the 1 (wo)man show acquires a team as well as starts outsourcing tasks that were being performed earlier by the owner. At that point, hopefully they’ll find my post and have a checklist ready for immediate action. 🙂

Thank God you got suspicious about the ‘no charge’ receipts and the lack of cash income on weekends, Beverley, otherwise the employee would have gotten bold and spread his skimming (the term used for such actions related to cash in business) to weekdays as well. A little foolish of the employee to do it with the Sunday business though and to make all the rentals a no charge. Had he done it properly, it would have taken longer for you to discover the embezzlement.

It happens a lot more than you would imagine. I received a text message from the gentleman who looks after my computer this morning advising clients not to tip the service personnel reporting for repair jobs and to report to him if the personnel demands additional money other to that agreed upon. I have a feeling someone has faced this problem and reported it to the owner. It’s never happened before and the question for the owner is, how long has this been going on or if it is a specific one-off incident?

Thanks Tamuria! Auditors and finance professionals are known to go into the deep end when explaining the intricacies of controls and checks and I wanted to share an example which would make the concept clear for the reader instead of making their eyes glaze over. 🙂

The best philosophy for life and business is to keep it simple and keep the eyes open!

I remember when we discovered a ‘crack’ in keeping track of our Sunday employees when I was a partner in a video rental chain in the 80’s. For a few weeks there seemed to be hardly any revenue for rentals for Sundays. I started to think something must be wrong, especially when we were putting away the movie returns at the beginning of the week. As I looked through the ‘receipts’ from the day (all were manually written of course, it was the 80’s), I found a lot of ‘no charge’ receipts. When I asked the employee why there were so many no charges that day, he said people had come back with ‘defective’ videos that didn’t play on their machines and he gave them a replacement. He said they worked on ours though. Hmm. I set out to ask a few of the good customers who I knew about this and sure enough, found that they were paying cash and he was pocketing it! The customers had no idea this was happening, but of course we confronted the employee and he ultimately admitted it. Something so simple when you have a cash business. Thanks for sharing such a detailed list of ways to ensure we have all of our internal controls in place. As I now work on my own, I am in charge of everything and hopefully not too much is escaping me.

Thanks Roslyn. I went on that assignment thinking it was just that, an assignment where I would do my work and get paid. Then when I started interacting with the Lodge Staff, I realized how much more was at stake and it became a crusade to find the leak. I still have the laughing Buddha statue the employees gave me as a farewell gift.

The credit card company is wise to have given you both separate numbers. In case of a credit card theft, it is easier to track down where the misuse might take place. I remember a friend had given his son a credit card while he was away at University for his needs. Imagine the son’s surprise when his father called him long distance to inquire why he had bought expensive Havana Cigars. It turned out it was for friends but the son didn’t know that the father was getting alerts and an itemized bill for the spending on the add-on card and really thought his father had super powers. 🙂

Edgar Alan Poe did say that truth is stranger than fiction, Reba. 🙂 When I look back across the rivers of Time, it feels like a dream, especially the night a Tigress killed a deer right in front of my Lodge Room. I might just include the whole story in my memoires. 🙂