Small businesses often sit on other poultry for money-hunters seeking honors or settlements. Some can be real, others bogus. Nevertheless, all are costly in terms of time, legal fees, and payouts (if the business loses or settles). Knowing the problem spots can help you devise strategies for avoiding trouble. Guide to selecting the best bail bonds in San Jose.
Here are the critical problem areas and some ideas for staying out of trouble.
1. Employee theft and fraud
According to the bi-annual survey by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE), in 2008, businesses lost 7% of their revenue to fraud. Unfortunately, because of having fewer or weaker controls in place, small businesses (fewer than 100 employees) are less likely to discover problems than their larger counterparts; they suffer median losses of $200 000 compared with $116 000 for companies with 1 000 employees. The most common small business fraud schemes that small businesses fell victim to were check tampering and fraudulent billing.
Strategies: Hire right and avoid employees that might give you trouble. Do careful background checks and restrict access to financial information. Find more tips about this kind of at SCORE. Also, inform your staff that you will practice legal action for any employee robbery or fraud, including an offender complaint.
2. Member of staff workplace issues
Employees could and often do bring states against an employer for various complaints, including sexual harassment, elegance (based on age, male or female, race, or national origin), and wrongful termination.
Tactics: Make company policy a simple fact that to staff. For example, speak that sexual harassment will not be tolerated and provide procedures intended for lodging complaints and examining complaints; then follow up upon all complaints with your designs. Please include the company plan in your employee manual, and have each employee sign a statement that they have read the guide.
Also, consider carrying work practices liability (EPL) protection in case activities can’t be avoided. Having protection means the insurance company’s lawyer will defend you against protected claims by employees or even former employees (you tend to be, of course, free to use your attorney) and will pay claims to the limit of your protection.
3. Contract disputes
Hear the expression “not worth the paper it’s created on? ” Unfortunately, a lot of agreements written straight down fail to reflect the parties’ actual intentions adequately or even include all the necessary conditions and terms. You will want to have written contracts among co-owners (e., Gary the gadget guy., buy-sell agreements), with suppliers and suppliers, and often along with customers and even some personnel.
Strategies: Work with an attorney, which means your position is adequately shielded. (If you draft an agreement using online resources, be sure to understand an attorney reviewed it before signing it. ) No longer rush the contract course of action. When doing business with much larger organizations that present legal agreements to you for signing (usually on a take-it-or-leave-it basis), remember to have it reviewed by your attorney; doing this won’t get rid of the deal.
4. non-paying buyers
If you have sold goods and services and aren’t paid promptly, you will wind up with collection troubles. This can lead to the need for a lawyer’s letter to the buyer or to take a nonpayer for you to small claims court. You’ll never recover the total balance due to you, and you’ll have to spend considerable time on collections.
Tactics: Don’t be a banker on your customers; make them pay through cash (or with a MasterCard, PayPal, or other identical payment methods) at the place of service or distribution. If you must sell upon credit terms, verify that the customers are creditworthy whenever large sums are at risk. Also, adopt efficient selection policies, including close getting in touch once payment is overdue.
5. Personal injury actions
Slip-and-fall cases and other personal injury activities are quickly brought against small enterprises. As a result, claimants may believe that even though claims are bogus, these firms will settle rather than battle.
Unfortunately, all too often, these claimants are proper. The cost of injury actions against small businesses is staggering — small businesses endure 69% of business tort liability costs while gathering only 19% of company revenue. Find a citation with this and other appalling statistics concerning the cost to our economy and small businesses here.
Strategies: Choose premises as safe as possible. Recoveries are allowed only when it can be shown that you have already been negligent. For example, look for possible trip-ups, such as torn carpets or exposed wires within areas visited by the open. Have a risk-management assessment done by your insurers, OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Wellbeing Administration), or someone else that may help you find potential problems; you may fix them.
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