Is this theft?

wnb

wnb

wnb

Soldato
Joined
27 Feb 2004
Posts
3,983
My accountant noticed that one of my suppliers has been paid twice so I wrote to them last November asking for them to look at it. They have agreed that an error has been made and have appologised and they do owe me the money.

What had happened is my supplier chased up a payment, I contacted my bank stopped the check and issued a new one. They had infact received both checks and cashed both checks with a 2 month gap between checks being cashed.

I have been promised they will send me refund and that it is in the post and I still dont have it. They are just full of excuses, it is now over 5 months and I want my money back. it looks like I will have to take them to the small claims but would the Police be interested?

Oh and they owe me £4300
 
Tell them that you are considering taking them to court over the issue, it might make them cough up and would be much less hassle than actually proceeding.
 
Send them a standard solicitor's letter notifying them that you will begin court proceedings within x days. Most places won't charge much for this.
 
Threaten legal action but you really need to start reconciling your bank on something like Quickbooks or Sage! What else has gone missing if you didnt notice £4300 had been taken out of your account, twice!!
 
Mark M said:
Threaten legal action but you really need to start reconciling your bank on something like Quickbooks or Sage! What else has gone missing if you didnt notice £4300 had been taken out of your account, twice!!
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Not always stops it. We have Sage and we still occasionally pay people twice.

And as for them banking the cheque twice I can understand. We open the post and all cheques are banked that morning. It's only perhaps later that when we input them on Sage that we notice that somebody has overpaid.

And even big companies do it (and are more likely to). We have just had a major plc pay us all the credit notes we issued them as invoices so they have currenly overpaid us by £20,000.
 
Mark M said:
Threaten legal action but you really need to start reconciling your bank on something like Quickbooks or Sage! What else has gone missing if you didnt notice £4300 had been taken out of your account, twice!!
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Well your right and it is something I have started, I now use sage 50.
 
wnb said:
I have been promised they will send me refund and that it is in the post and I still dont have it. They are just full of excuses, it is now over 5 months and I want my money back. it looks like I will have to take them to the small claims but would the Police be interested?
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No, the Police won't be interested. Contact a solicitor and have a standard threat letter sent, then chase it up through the courts.
 
Greebo said:
Not always stops it. We have Sage and we still occasionally pay people twice.
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Make sure whoever's posting your cheques to Sage:

- Posts them to Sage immediately that they are raised and certainly before they're posted out.
- Reconciles the bank weekly and allocates the bank payment to the sales ledger immediately that the cheque presents.
- Ensures that another cheque isn't issued before the other cheque has definitely been cancelled.

Simple controls, I just don't see how anyone manages duplicate payments if they're doing things properly.

The strange thing is, wnb, that every time I've cancelled a cheque, the bank has told me on the phone whether or not it's already been cashed :confused:. How can the bank confirm a cancelled cheque if it's already been cashed? I don't think you cancelled the cheque, did you ;).
 
Robbie G said:
Snip ;).
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Problem for us is duplicate invoices been inputed. We have about 3000 purchase invoices per month. It is one area where Sage fails. Our old accounts package would have a pop up box if you tried to input an invoice with the same number on a supplier. Unfortunately Sage bought them out and as yet Sage has not added this feature to their software.

Sage added a duplicate invoice checking program to their last version but it is badly broken. It takes about two days to run and nobody can be in accounts while it is been run.

So we do carry out checks but I would be liar if I didn't say that it doesn't happen sometimes but usually we spot it within a week or so and either get a refund or if it is a regular supplir, just knock the amount off the next payment.

Oh and would agree about the stopped cheque. They always check when I do one to make sure its not cleared then and then it really shouldn't clear if presented for payment. Only once has this happened and it was the banks fault so they refunded us.
 
police will see it as a civil matter, theft is:
dishonestly appropriating property belonging to another with the intention to permanently deprive the other of it...

a key point is you have agreed to let them pay you back etc, it's a civil matter and the police will tell you that. Plus they've said they'll pay you back so at this time they've got no intention of keeping it
 
dbov22 said:
police will see it as a civil matter, theft is:
dishonestly appropriating property belonging to another with the intention to permanently deprive the other of it...

a key point is you have agreed to let them pay you back etc, it's a civil matter and the police will tell you that. Plus they've said they'll pay you back so at this time they've got no intention of keeping it
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Indeed. Not a Police issue.
 
moneyclaim.gov.uk file a claim for your £4,300 plus the moneyclaim fee the court will write to them, i bet they pay then, its also good practice to write to them giving them 7 days notice that you will file with the county courts
 
Greebo said:
Problem for us is duplicate invoices been inputed. We have about 3000 purchase invoices per month. It is one area where Sage fails.
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Ah, indeed. I have Excel integrated reporting queries set up for some of my Sage-using clients, that run daybooks by invoice date and supplier. Then a pivot table does a count of each invoice reference, to highlight duplicates when they do their payment run (i.e. any invoice number that doesn't have a count of '1' sticks out like a sore thumb). However Sage could certainly handle dupes better.
 
Robbie G said:
Ah, indeed. I have Excel integrated reporting queries set up for some of my Sage-using clients, that run daybooks by invoice date and supplier. Then a pivot table does a count of each invoice reference, to highlight duplicates when they do their payment run (i.e. any invoice number that doesn't have a count of '1' sticks out like a sore thumb). However Sage could certainly handle dupes better.
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You wouldn't mind sharing that spreadsheet would you please? :D
 
Setting up the Sage integrated reporting needs to be done locally, so there's not much to send :p.

I did however, make a custom daybook report in Sage Report Designer (taking both invoices and credit notes, as the default Sage one has two separate reports for daybooks), which usually just drops into C:\ProgramData\Sage\Accounts\2010\Company.xxx\Reports\Excel and is then accessible in the Sage 50 Excel integration menu.

It's a .report file. This might be useful to you? Though you'd need to tailor it anyway as it'll be using fields you haven't enabled or don't use, and vice versa. It's been created in Sage 50 Accounts Professional 2010.

The only part of it that really relates to Excel in terms of sending you a spreadsheet, is the pivot table :).

Smaller clients just tend to tell their accounts clerk to be bloody careful that there isn't already an invoice on the account with the same reference :p.
 
Robbie G said:
Setting up the Sage integrated reporting needs to be done locally, so there's not much to send :p.

I did however, make a custom daybook report in Sage Report Designer (taking both invoices and credit notes, as the default Sage one has two separate reports for daybooks), which usually just drops into C:\ProgramData\Sage\Accounts\2010\Company.xxx\Reports\Excel and is then accessible in the Sage 50 Excel integration menu.

It's a .report file. This might be useful to you? Though you'd need to tailor it anyway as it'll be using fields you haven't enabled or don't use, and vice versa. It's been created in Sage 50 Accounts Professional 2010.

The only part of it that really relates to Excel in terms of sending you a spreadsheet, is the pivot table :).

Smaller clients just tend to tell their accounts clerk to be bloody careful that there isn't already an invoice on the account with the same reference :p.
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That would be cool. Thanks. My email is in my trust. And I can't do pivot tables :o so although I may need to mod it, that would be a start as well.

And our Sage is linked to our Microsoft office and we can export stright into excel. Is this what you meant?
 
Greebo said:
That would be cool. Thanks. My email is in my trust. And I can't do pivot tables :o so although I may need to mod it, that would be a start as well.

And our Sage is linked to our Microsoft office and we can export stright into excel. Is this what you meant?
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Yep :).

Will email you at a later point.
 
Left another message today as he is out of the office and in a meeting. The senior person in the building will email him today with my contact details asking him to call me today.

Thanks Burnsy I will check out moneyclaim.gov.uk tonight at home.
 
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