Lessons from a Chinese Restaurant
Yesterday my wife and I dined at our favorite Chinese restaurant. We love the establishment. Nearly everything on the menu is cooked in a dish-specific sauce. The food presentation is lovely. The wait staff are pleasant. And once a week the restaurant stocks a dinner buffet that’s to die for. The lines can get a little long but the food is worth the wait. The buffet includes about twenty dishes and although a few dishes appear week after week the rest of the buffet dishes vary from week to week. My wife and I try to get there at least once a month.
And yesterday, for the first time I noticed that the owners had set up a hand-sanitizer dispenser immediately inside the front door. Perhaps the owners placed it there a while ago and I never paid attention to it. But that doesn’t matter. Its presence got me to thinking about being cautious. That’s exactly what the owners were doing: being cautious.
After being seated and having finished a cup of hot and sour soup I approached the buffet and for the first time really “noticed” the clear cough shields just above the food trays. They’ve been there as long as I’ve been going to this restaurant but it was another reminder of the precautions the owners had taken (although in this case the precautions were likely mandated by the board of health).
Then, as I left the buffet area with a plateful of food I grabbed a pair of chopsticks as I always do. And for the first time really “noticed” that Chinese restaurants no longer wash and reuse chopsticks as they do with flatware. Now all chopsticks are individually wrapped, used by one and only one customer and then disposed of. Although this, too, may be mandated it’s just another sign of the precautions taken by restaurants to protect the health and well-being of their clients.
“Caution” is also an important word when dealing with a business’ financials. TraceTech Solutions, LLC was formed to provide business owners with a precautionary option that had never been available. TraceTech provides a second pair of eyes on a business’ books. We leverage the power of IT to look for nearly-inevitable bookkeeping errors and the occasional possibility of theft.
TraceTech doesn’t believe that most bookkeepers intentionally make bookkeeping errors. But the fact is that bookkeeping is a manual, detail-oriented task often performed by multi-tasking administrators. Errors creep into books and sometimes never come out. Errors that can skew financials reports. Errors that can stymie people who try to make sense of the numbers.
And then, occasionally a dishonest bookkeeper will intentionally enter errors. Or enter valid but fraudulent transactions. The results can range from mildly annoying to catastrophic.
Either way, the operative word for owners is “caution”. This blog site has always provided its readers with simple and effective precautionary tools that can reduce the risk of financial theft and reporting error. We encourage our readers to learn from our past blog posts. A little caution can go a long, long way to saving a business.
a
Start from the most-recent blog post here: TraceTech Solutions’ Blog. We publish new articles frequently. If you’d like to receive a new article the instant that it’s published, click on the Subscription link in the upper right part of this page.
TraceTech Solutions provides small businesses with unique, low-cost financial books monitoring services. Learn more about TraceTech’s services here: TraceTech Solutions website.
