He invited me to come visit him and I did so about a month later. We went to lunch and he began to tell me about his business problems and asked if I would like to look into these and see if I could straighten out his accounting. I told him I would need to have access to him financial records. He told me that I could look at anything I needed. One week later I meet with the doctor again after having gone through what was a real mess in his financial record keeping. Actually he had no system at all. He was running 2 seven figure businesses and had no idea where his money was going. If you work with doctors this is probably not any thing new.
I asked about the absence an accounting system and asked how he possibly could pay his bills. He asked if I had seen the bag he carried around. I had observed that ever day he arrived and left his practice with a large bag that he carried all of his mail in. He explained that he would take his bills home in that bag, spread them out on his pool table and try to figure out who to pay. (You can stop laughing now because it gets worst) I asked how he knew if he had enough money to cover the checks. He tells me “I call the bank everyday to see if there is money in the account.” I asked about checks that have not yet cleared. I think there was a long silence after that.
Over the course of the next several weeks I find out his wife is stealing checks from the business, he has no accounting filing system, paid his bills based on statements from his suppliers and not from invoices and credits and to top it all off the IRS is after him for under reporting his income. So began a long seven year ordeal of getting him out of financial hot water.
No comments:
Post a Comment