Get Control of Your Money in a Crisis


Between yesterday and today my CFO and I spent 14 hours on hold with our bank. As if a pandemic is not challenging enough, someone stole one of our checks from a vendor’s mailbox and then cloned it and cashed it three times in one day before we caught it in the daily reconcile.

To make this even more challenging, our biggest client pays us via ACH and that payment came in the middle of this and was rejected by our bank because our account was under fraud review.

Because we have our accounts in order with separate payroll and operating and savings we’ll be okay. But we won’t ever get those hours back and in the middle of this crisis time is a very precious commodity.

Imagine if we weren’t on top of our accounts and if we weren’t set up to the best of our ability to weather a crisis?

I want you to also weather this crisis. In the big plans I do for my corporate clients there’s always a checklist for the finance department. To make sure you are as solid as can be, I made you a Finance Checklist you can download here.

At the very least you need to do four things:

  1. Have a real hard look at your cash flow. Know exactly where all of your accounts stand and what your real budget is.
  2. If you are in a precarious position, face it head on. So many people are also in this position because of how big this crisis is. Be the person who comes out okay because you faced it now.
  3. Tuck your money into bed daily. Check all of your balances every day. Fraud is typically rampant in a crisis because people who commit fraud know we are all distracted. If we hadn’t been doing this we’d have faced a huge delay in opening new accounts and restoring funds.
  4. People who are good at paperwork have a better shot. There will be help and assistance. But, it will come with lots of forms and lots of paperwork. Be ready and get your stuff in order.