Bookkeeping Case Study – Wholesale Distribution Company

CASE STUDY

CLIENT

A relatively new wholesale distribution company. In business for only one year but growing at a very rapid pace.

CHALLENGE

The business owners were 2 partners, one involved full time in the business. The second maintaining their external full time job and working evenings and weekends in their new venture. They found that with the company growing so rapidly they were falling behind in their bookkeeping and only doing what was required. They also didn’t feel that they had set up their QuickBooks accounting database correctly, as the inventory numbers on their balance sheet didn’t appear accurate. HST Returns had never been calculated or filed for the business resulting in a significant balance owing to CRA.

JOURNEY

The part-time Partner began spending more time on the bookkeeping side of the business in order to gain control of the situation. As they weren’t completely familiar with QuickBooks, they did not know how to correctly adjust some of the entries which they knew were incorrect. Unfortunately, some of these corrections artificially inflated the sales numbers. The inventory assets also hadn’t been set up correctly and the cost of each sale was also not flowing through to the income statement correctly, resulting in a larger gross profit than was actually being generated. Based on the numbers they had generated from QuickBooks, they made the decision for the part-time Partner to quit their full-time job and focus solely on this new business. Based on these numbers and the surplus cash flow, they also increasingly started taking money out of the business to pay themselves bonuses.

SOLUTION

We conducted our site assessment of their books and provided a detailed list of areas that needed to be addressed with the current financials. One of the biggest challenges was that a bank reconciliation had never been completed since their inception 15 months prior, and that was our starting point. After completing the historical bank reconciliations we were able to determine which sales entries were incorrect and adjust them correctly. We also remapped all of the inventory assets so that both the sale and the purchases were flowing into the correct accounts.

RESULTS

The owners of this business now know their actual gross profit margin. They have this information for each of their products and now know which are their most profitable lines and which they should no longer be carrying. Accounts Payable entries are now completed on a weekly basis, so that they can monitor their cash flow requirements as well as make contingencies for the large balances due on their HST on a quarterly basis. Although they have indicated that had they known the actual figures of their sales and profit margin the owner may not yet have quit their other job, or paid themselves such extravagant bonuses, they now have the information available to them which will allow them to pay themselves only what the business can afford and to make future decisions so that they remain a viable business.