"The biggest thieves in many businesses are not the staff or employees...
"The biggest thieves in many businesses are not the staff or employees, they are the business owners themselves”
Aug 28, 2025
3 min
The reality of most small businesses today is that they have few or no systems & structures in place for financial accountability.
This means that even the business owner can withdraw money at any time for any reason and not intentionally keep a record of it. If this continues over time, the business will not survive for long.
If you are guilty of this and don't want your staff or employees to follow your footsteps, then start doing the following in your business:
1. Track your income (sales) either by creating an invoice for your clients, having a website where customers can shop for your products or setting up a third-party payment gateway to automate the process.
2. Track your expenses using software that has a collaborative feature so you can monitor every expense made, even in your absence.
3. Have official business accounts that capture all transactions for easy monthly reconciliations.
4. If you are currently in the early stage of your business where you are still investing your personal funds to grow it, keep detailed records of the amount spent and treat it as a loan (with an interest rate) that your business can pay you back when it has the capacity to.
5. Pay yourself a salary if your business has the capacity to, just like you would pay your staff or employees. This will help you stay disciplined, allowing you to reinvest the rest into your business.
6. In cases of emergencies where you need your business to lend you money, don't just take the money; record it and make plans to either refund it or substitute it as your subsequent monthly salary. The idea is to be intentional with tracking every amount spent.
7. Be financially disciplined and stay accountable to yourself and your business. Live within your means as much as you can, bearing in mind that your business money is not your personal money.
Are you guilty of this as a business owner?
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If you struggle with tracking your business income and expenses, I've created a solution to help you automate them, so you don’t have to stress anymore.
I call it Automated Income & Expense (AIE) Tracking, it’s a done-for-you automated bookkeeping service where all your business income and expenses will be automatically tracked for you in real-time.
If you have a backlog of data (past income & expense records) that you also want to capture, it will be done for you.
