a medspa in downtown miami we work with had this weird pattern show up when they were closing the books each month. like every week there’d be $50 or $100 missing here and there from appointments. nothing huge at first, but it kept adding up and nobody could figure out where it was going.
turns out the front desk girl was taking deposits straight to her own venmo. she wasn’t even deleting bookings or anything, just pocketing the money and letting the rest of the payment go through later. patients thought everything was fine, but the clinic was quietly losing thousands a month without realizing.
they only caught it after the accountant dug deep and noticed the same random shortfalls tied to certain bookings. the owner was stunned and felt betrayed since the woman had begged for the job to support her children
if you're asking how they did not notice earlier, this clinic does 6figs a month and so it wasn't anything crazy at first but after 2 months and $10k 'magically' missing the accounting team dug deep, not all their services require a deposit but the total per service is a defined value and when that value is missing $50-$100 consistently it becomes easy to find the leak
question if anyone in the beauty industry experiences this? or maybe in your industry
the receptionist who rerouted $10k in deposits to her venmo
byu/maverickhealthagents inEntrepreneur
Posted by maverickhealthagents
8 Comments
How did she take the deposit with Venmo? Why is the deposit not paid with a card at time of booking?
We work with a lot of med spas and most of them have their own payment processor that takes a deposit at time of booking.
Happens all the time. We even had a manager pocket other staffs travel reimbursements apart from students fees and clients payments. Had to involve their parents, cops. Reception will always be where the leak is.
Whoever is in charge of the money should be fired. Full stop. Actually, just fire all of management because this should have been found a lot sooner. People who don’t know how to manage a business should not be in business
I wrote case management software for a large ticket Lawyer in Miami.
A lot of people come in with cash and pay. I told him I need to generate a report against what’s deposited every week. He declined.
Like two years later, he is shocked to find out he’s missing money and asked me for a report to reconcile payments with deposits.
I’m a bit confused with this story. It says it was 100 per week. Which adds to 400 a month. But then it says it added up to 10K in 2 months?
This happens in all kinds of businesses, unfortunately. It’s happened in businesses that I owned.
Good bookkeeping / proper controls usually catch it. If it can be proven, in this case with Venmo transactions, I’d encourage the employer to at least file a police report.
We filed a police report (they didn’t do anything – but we needed the documentation), sued the former employee in small claims court (we won), shortly after their new employer discovered a much bigger fraud being perpetuated by the employee and he’s now in jail. Us suing the former employee lead them to look into his deals.
Employee theft is usually more than other types of theft. My Dad had a baby business in the 70’s and employees were stealing straight from the register, and moving product in the back of the stores. This was before high-end video equipment. Try a membership option instead, or validated gift cards assigned to clients, with a ledger system.
How did the patients not notice they were venmoing a random person?