Accounts Clerks
Monitor creditor and debtor accounts and undertake related routine documentation.
Payment day at the nursery
You are an accounts clerk at a plant nursery, paying suppliers, chasing customer payments and keeping the books accurate. It is Thursday and payment day. Forty invoices need to be checked and paid by three, a customer is calling about a statement and the owner is asking about cash.
Choose what you would do. Then see what happens. There are often good reasons for each choice.
Hi, it's Rhonda. Just checking you got the invoice for the March deliveries. I sent it twice, in case the first went missing. Both are in your inbox. Please pay when you can.
Pay both, as she asked, and sort out any difference later
Rhonda is paid twice and you have to ask for a refund. It takes weeks and costs goodwill. A routine check would have stopped it.
Pay the later one only, because it is the most recent version
You paid one, but you did not check whether the two were identical. This time they were. Checking the invoice numbers takes ten seconds.
Check whether the second one is a duplicate and pay only one
The two are the same invoice with the same number. You pay it once and tell Rhonda. A double payment would have been hard to get back and awkward to explain.
I paid you last week. It went from my account on the Friday. I have the receipt. Why have I just had a reminder saying I still owe you money? This is very annoying.
Tell him the system says he has not paid and ask him to send the receipt again
He sends it, grumbling. It confirms what he said, but he felt doubted from the start. The check was fair, though it could have been kinder.
Tell him you will look into it and call him back by end of day
You find the payment, entered against the wrong customer, and move it. You call him back before five with an apology. A clear time makes a customer feel looked after.
Cancel the reminder and move on without finding out what happened
The reminder goes away, but the payment is still sitting under the wrong name. Next month the same customer is chased again.
Cash is tight this week. Can you hold off paying the small suppliers and pay the big ones first? The small ones will not mind. They are local and they know us.
Do as she asks and tell no one
The small suppliers are not told and begin to ring in. Some of them are family businesses who count on that payment. Being asked is not the same as being told what is going on.
Ask which suppliers matter most, and offer to ring the small ones before the due date
Lorraine agrees to pay two small suppliers on time and delay the others by a few days. You ring them and they accept. A phone call turns a delay into an arrangement.
Refuse and say the payments were due on time
Lorraine is annoyed and you have left her with no ideas. Your job is to make cash decisions clear to the owner, not to be the one who makes them for her.
How it went
At three the payments go out, the reconciliation matches and the owner has a clear picture of the cash. Accounts clerks make sure money goes to the right place, on time and for the right amount. Does attention to detail like that sound like a strength of yours?
This is a simplified, fictional situation to help you explore. It is not professional instruction or a test of your ability.
Case study: The small difference that mattered
A fictional case set in the accounts office of a wholesale plant nursery that supplies garden centres.
The situation
Callum was the accounts clerk at Greenleaf Wholesale Nursery. At the end of one month, the bank reconciliation was out by a small amount. Everyone said it was too small to matter, and the manager wanted the books closed so the accounts could go to the owner. Callum had a sense that a small difference in the books usually has a cause, and that some causes are not small.
What they did
He worked through the month's entries line by line. The gap was not a single mistake but two: a number typed with two digits swapped, and a bank charge that had never been recorded. Neither on its own looked alarming, but one of them was hiding a larger payment that had been entered to the wrong customer. He corrected both, wrote a note explaining each fix and asked the manager to look at the second one.
How it turned out
The accounts went to the owner a day late, and balanced. The wrongly entered payment meant a customer had been sent a reminder for money they had already paid. Callum rang them to apologise. The manager agreed to review entries weekly rather than monthly.
What would you do?
- Why might someone decide a small gap was not worth chasing?
- What did Callum do that made his fix easy for others to check?
- How would you apologise to a customer who got a reminder by mistake?