Question

You are the accountant for a small food and beverage wholesaler. It is the last day of the current accounting month and business has been slow for the past 2 hours. You have just finished finalizing the books and your company had a nice profit of $175,000 this month which exceeded expectations. As you turn off your computer and get ready to leave, the sales personnel are starting to lock up the front of the store when one of them approaches you. He explains that a long-standing customer (who always pays his bills) had just come in, was in a big hurry since he is planning a large event and left with $35,000 worth of product asking them to send him a bill. What will you do and why?

Answer 1

The amount of money involved in the transaction is quite huge and so I will make sure to take some precautionary measures to save this firm from any kind of loss.

Also, we know from the question that this month's sales are on the higher side and there are more profits than previously expected.

Well, of course, we ought to serve each and every customer every way possible since sales and customer satisfaction are of foremost importance.

Now, what we can do is we can provide the services to the customer and record the bill the next day on the previous day which will give us the exact position of profit that was earned in the month and will also not hinder the customer's trust on us.

Another option is to provide the bill as soon as possible on the same day as he is a valuable customer and enter the transaction details into the accounting software which will recalculate the profit and make changes in the balance sheet all by itself so it wouldn't be a tedious task.

This is the best way to proceed in this case since the bill will be provided the same day and also the profit figure will add up on the basis of expenses incurred which is always good for business.

And, in the case, the service is to be provided on a later date but the customer specifically asks for the bill the same day then it should be recorded for the next months so as to not inflate the current profit and the next month's profit is accurately calculated.

Finally, whatever solution one chooses to go with it should be kept in mind that the customer receives the services in time and the bill is provided to him. The rest of the things can be adopted.