He could not say where his money was going
A restaurant owner, running the place on his own · Named with his permission
He was running a restaurant and could not say where the money was going.
We went through his P&L line by line, and I asked about the ones he could not explain.
USD 27,000 a year, for a service he never used, stopped.
The problem
He told me straight out that he did not know much about his own finances or where the money was going. He had been running the place for years. That is not unusual and it is not carelessness: nobody starts a restaurant because they enjoy reading a profit and loss statement, and the numbers arrive from an accountant already summarised, in a format built for the tax office rather than for the person paying the bills.
What I built
Nothing was built. This is what the calls actually looked like.
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I asked him to bring his P&L, so we were looking at his own figures and not at my opinion.
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We went down it line by line, and I asked what each one was. The ones he could not answer are the interesting ones.
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One line he could not explain at all. I told him to go and ask his accountant exactly what it was for.
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It was a service he was paying for and never used. He stopped it that week.
Proof
It had been running for years before anyone looked, so the total is a multiple of the yearly figure. It was the most severe of what we found, not the only thing: the others were smaller and adding up quickly. He had an accountant the entire time it was running, which is the point. Leaks like this one do not survive because people are careless. They survive because the person who could recognise it is never the person reading the statement.