Effortlessly manage sub-consultants, including their contracts, pay requests, and payouts. We even manage consultant pass-throughs that you need to bill to your client.

Imagine knowing exactly how much sub-consultant liability you are on the hook for at all times. Your pay-when-paid liability is automatically calculated and kept up to date. Never be surprised again.

Integrated subcontracts with tracking for pay requests and payouts.

Sub-Consultants

We take pride in offering free support every step of the way. Our dedicated team ensures you make the most of our system without incurring additional costs. We understand the importance of support in your software journey. 

Whether you have questions, need assistance with implementation, or require guidance on using specific features, our support is just a message or call away. Your success is our priority, and we're here to support you in every way possible.

You should never have to pay extra for support. Period!

Unlimited Free Support

How would you like to impress your co-workers with how fast you process this month’s billings? Give yourself a powerful tool that adapts to your specific billing requirements.

Whether you need to bill clients on a fixed-fee basis, track hourly billings, account for expenses, or handle consultant pass-throughs, our software has you covered. It simplifies the process of integrating time slips and expenses into invoices, ensuring accurate and efficient billing that meets your client’s expectations.

Quickly generate invoices and never miss a billable

Invoices

Effortlessly track and respond to information requests with our robust system. Stay organized, improve communication, and ensure timely responses to inquiries, all in one user-friendly platform. Keeping track of information requests and timely responses is crucial for business operations. 

This functionality enhances organization, improves communication, and ensures that your team can provide timely and accurate responses to inquiries. All of this is achieved within one user-friendly platform.

RFIs, transmittals, memos, all in one place.

Logbook

You can empower yourself and your team with our real-time tracking and planning system. Gain dynamic insights to stay in control and ensure project success. Our project management software is designed to streamline every aspect of your project lifecycle, from initial planning to final delivery.

With real-time tracking and planning features, allocate resources efficiently and make data-driven decisions to ensure successful project outcomes. Say goodbye to messy spreadsheets and the hassles of manual project management, and embrace a digital solution that will transform how you manage projects.

Plan, budget, and track all your projects in real-time

Project Management

Whether you love or hate writing contract proposals, you will like doing it in our system. You will amaze your clients with how quickly you can produce a contract. When doing so, we will tell you several key performance indicators, such as your fee as a percentage of construction cost and fee per budgeted hour.

Your open proposals can be converted into new projects with the click of a button - 

 - just click and go. This integrated approach ensures a smooth transition from the proposal stage to project execution, enhancing your workflow and efficiency.

Build estimates, send drafts, and convert to projects.

Proposals

 enter data twice! Streamline your finances with our seamless QuickBooks integration. Simplify transaction management to boost the efficiency of your business.

 over which of the following transaction types you would like to push to QuickBooks:

Push your data to Quickbooks Desktop or Online accounting.

Quickbooks Integration

Create personalized, user-friendly reports tailored to your business needs. Our intuitive reporting tools simplify data analysis and visualization, empowering you to make informed decisions. Data analysis and reporting are at the core of informed decision-making.

Our software provides intuitive reporting tools that empower you to create personalized, user-friendly reports tailored to your business needs. Whether you require financial insights, project performance data, or resource utilization analytics, our reporting features simplify data analysis. 

Slice and dice your data to understand your firm's performance

Custom Reporting

Even though fires break out and interrupt your day, you still need to plan. How would you like to have a single page that shows you where staff have been allocated?

We all know that resource allocation is critical for project success. But keeping it current is a pain in the butt - at least it used to be. Now, you can empower your staff to update their projected workloads with ease, keeping the entire team updated with who is overloaded and who is available to help put the fires out.

Understand your backlog and future staffing needs.

Resources

Do you want to be the office hero? Empower your team to log their time and expenses easily, even on the go. Our intuitive system simplifies this mundane task, making it effortless for your staff, wherever they are. Your time tracking and expense management will be hassle-free with our user-friendly system.

You can give your team the best tool for keeping their efforts up to date. This will give your project managers current data on project costs and progress.

Our timesheets are almost magical

Time & Expenses

Efficiently assign and track tasks with our powerful task management feature. Add todo items from every module to ensure nothing falls through the cracks. Effective task management is essential for project success. But it is also needed as followup reminders on proposals, invoices, and general client relations.

Being able to link todo items to contacts, companies, and other records means you will have critical insights when browsing various areas of the software.

Keep on top of your staff and make sure the work is gettng done.

Todo Items

This video explores the cash flow challenges that all AE firms deal with. It will give you some insights into your operation.

Cash Flow Time Line

The quicker you produce your monthly invoices, the quicker you will get paid. Here are several steps you can implement to shorten the time it takes to issue your invoices.

Expediting Billings

Getting your invoice into the hands of your client is easy. Getting them to pay the invoice promptly is a different story. Here are some things you can do to improve your collection time.

AR - How to Reduce Your Collection Time

The Overhead Factor lets you know exactly how much overhead you need to apply to each project.

The first thing you will need is a twelve-month profit and loss statement. Why twelve months? Some of your expenses only come once a year, and so we want to make sure that they get allocated across all the projects you work on.

You might have a short project that only lasts for three months during the year, but if, during those three months, none of your annual expenses came in, then they wouldn't be allocated to that job if you did this on a month-by-month basis. Every job needs to carry the total burden of a year in business.

In this example, we’ve included what usually goes into the expenses of the average AE firm. See what your expenses look like so you can get a good grasp of how you can apply this principle to your firm.

When calculating your overhead factor, look at your P&L statement and focus on your expenses. Make sure that your accounting software splits the payroll value into direct and indirect payroll.

Direct payroll is the wages you pay your employees for the time they spend working on projects you're getting paid for. Indirect payroll is the wages you pay your employees for time spent doing other activities.

Indirect payroll may include marketing, accounting, billing, client outings, being in the golf tournament or attending the barbecue, continuing education and professional development, holidays, vacation time or PTO time, or sick time. All of that is your indirect payroll because when they're doing those activities, they are not earning money for your firm.

As for health insurance, 401k match, etc. - they all fall into Indirect Payroll or Overhead to make everything simpler.

Watch This Video To Get More Information About How Calculating Your Overhead Factor

What we're going to do in the calculation is we're going to take our total expenses; let’s take this amount for example - let’s say you have $809,625 in Total Expenses, and we're going to subtract $310,000 worth of direct payroll to get our overhead cost of $499,625.

Once you have your $499,625 you're going to take that direct payroll amount and divide it in to get your overhead factor. So in this example, there's $1.61 of overhead for every dollar of direct labor, and that's about average for architects and engineers in the United States.

Your overhead factor might be different from the average $1.61. It could be higher or lower than that. And that's why you need to do the calculations. You need to know exactly what your Firm’s overhead factor is. We have clients that go as low as a dollar, and those that go as high as two dollars.

Then you can use this overhead factor to multiply times your direct labor on your project to calculate the overhead that the project needs to be burdened with and that once subtracted from your revenue, take the revenue, subtract your direct labor, subtract the overhead and that'll give you project by project net profits.

If you happen to be one of our clients, you can put your overhead factor directly into the software and every time an employee records time, their direct labor and the overhead factor is applied to that time cost. So we're going to give you in real-time as your employees record their time, your direct cost, your overhead cost, and if you have revenues, it will calculate your net profits.

Your overhead factor is a key value if you want to know your true project costs. Take a look at this video to see how you will calculate your overhead factor. Then take a peek at our companion video on how to use it.

KPI - Calculating Your Overhead (OH) Factor For AE Firms

In a related article we examined the caculation used to find your overhead factor. 

You can check it out first before you dive into this post.

After learning how to calculate your overhead factor, we’ll now be talking about using your overhead factor and applying it to your projects. With the overhead factor, you’ll be able to calculate total project costs and what percentage of your project profit is.

The overhead factor is just a ratio of your overhead to your direct labor. When you take your overhead and divide it by your direct labor, that's going to give you your overhead factor.

In the United States, the average overhead factor is 1.65, which means that for every dollar of direct labor you have $1.65 of overhead. We have clients that go as low as $1, and there are those that go as high as $2. Your firm's overhead factor should fall somewhere in that range, and the best way to know where your firm stands is to learn how to calculate your overhead factor.

Take your direct labor for a given project and multiply it by the overhead factor, giving you the overhead that needs to be burdened on that project. So, if we had $ 1,500 of direct labor, we multiplied by 1.65, which is the average overhead factor in the United States, and that would give us $2,475 of overhead.

To calculate the total project cost, we need to have our direct labor plus any direct expenses plus overhead, which gives you your project cost. In this example, we take the $ 1,500, and then we will assume $85 of direct expenses. Then you add the $2,475 of overhead. We ended up with $4,060 of total project cost.

Now, we can calculate the project profits. We will take the project revenue and subtract the project cost, giving us the project profits.

Taking the $5,200 minus the $4,060 gives us $1,140 of profits, and that's a whopping 22%. Having project profits north of 20% is a great goal to hit.

You will have to do all these calculations on all your projects to know where they fall. Unless, of course, you're using our software.

BaseBuilders lets you plug your overhead factor directly into the software. With BaseBuilders, all the calculations we just discussed are done automatically for you. you can see your net profits from all projects presented on a project-by-project basis; you can break projects into segments and compare them with other ongoing or previous projects to see how your firm is doing.

What are segments? Segments are a way to group and classify your projects. They enable the comparison of various project types. You might compare your office buildings to your schools, to your churches, to your hospitals, or maybe compare your design-build projects to your plan-spec to your design-assist or maybe even one project manager to another project manager. Apply your overhead factor, and you'll know exactly how your projects are doing.

If you found this post helpful, please share it with your associates and colleagues.

If you want to reach more significant levels of profitability and success, try our software today!

KPI - Using Your Overhead Factor

Your Net Multiplier is an essential measurement of project success on the financial front.

KPI - Net Multiplier

How should you measure your Operating Profit Percentage? Should you be using your total revenue or net revenue?

KPI - Operating Profit Percentage

What is Profit and what is Cash Flow? We’re going to clarify the meaning and difference between these two terms. We’re also going to dive into its relevance as it relates to your business and your business’ viability.

What is profit? Profit is typically what you're going to end up reporting on your taxes. It's going to affect, but it is not, your bank balance. Your bank balance comes from cash flow.

Without profit, your business is not going to last very long. If you don't become profitable, you’ll soon be closing the doors because you won't have an unlimited supply of funds to make up the difference.

To calculate your Operating Profit, you must first get your Net Revenue by subtracting your Direct Expenses from your Gross Revenue. After that, you then need to subtract your Direct Labor, Indirect Labor, and Expenses such as rent, Insurance, and Equipment from your Net Revenue.

Now that you have your Operating Profit Value, you now have to subtract the bonuses or other optional expenses from it to get the Value for your Net Profit.

Cash flow determines your viability. If you don't have a positive cash flow, pretty soon, the bank account is empty, and you’ll be out of business.

You can end up with negative cash flow while making a profit. But if your profit is not enough to cover obligations such as debt service,  your bank account will be shrinking even though you're showing a profit. Cash flows can cause bankruptcies, at least when they're negative.

Simply put, cash flow is what's happening in your checking account. Much with the case of profitability, if you have negative cash flows, you are going to be out of business before long.

Here’s how the cash flow is calculated.

Start with your opening bank balance or the money you have in the bank, then you're going the add the following:

Income From Sales from accounts receivable.

Investor Capital or the money coming out of your own pocket to get your firm started.

Loans or the money you may have borrowed from the bank to start operating your firm. You could also be growing your credit card balances, or you brought in a line of credit and added money to your bank. 

The sum of all those numbers is your available funds.

After you get your available funds, you're going to be paying bills, servicing your debt, or doing capital purchases for your assets. You might make some distributions and put some money in your own pocket—that's always a good thing. Once you’ve subtracted all of those, you’ll get your closing balance.

Cash Flow is the difference between your opening balance and your closing balance. Hopefully, it's going to be positive. But there are times when it will be negative and those times are not always bad.

There can be a situation where you have negative profit and positive cash flow. When you put money in from your startup funding, you haven't made a profit yet, but your bank account grew. You may be getting a loan, like the PPP Loans that came during the COVID-19 crisis.

Another reason that might put you in this situation is when your credit card balances are growing. You're covering negative profits with that money, but you're not paying those balances down. Your cash flow is still going up because you're not paying those credit card balances.

It's also possible that you haven't paid your consultants yet. You might also have assets purchased last year that you're getting to depreciate now. 

If you're in this situation, it should raise some red flags. You need to know why you are in a negative profit while you're having a positive cash flow. Find out the cause and take action.

This isn't a great place to be, but it is typical for startups.

Let's say you funded the company in month one, and now we're into month two. You're not making a profit yet, and you've got your negative cash flows. In that case, it's normal as long as you have enough runway and enough cash in the bank to get you to where you're in the cycle where you are making money and have some positive cash flow.

Having too much overhead and too many expenses can also cause you to be in this situation. Also, having growing accounts receivable when your clients are not paying you yet could be another reason. You need to get that money collected and into the bank, so you can use it for your operations.

Some other reasons for a Negative Profit and Cash Flow might include having back payments to your consultants, Economic slowdowns like the Great Recession in 2009, the COVID-19 Crisis, or Bonus time where you might be paying bonuses out.

Let's say, for example, you've had operating profits of $12,000 and then paid out bonuses. Let's say the bonuses were for the last six months or maybe the last twelve months' worth of work, and you pay out $30,000. You've got a negative profit of $18,000.

Having negative profit and cash flow doesn't mean the end of the world for you. You just have to know why you are having these situations and whether you're negative in your cash flow, profit, or both.

If you’re in your debt reduction phase and you’re making money, but it’s not quite enough, you might find yourself in a situation where you have positive profit and negative cash flow. You might be doing this because it’s mandatory. You also might do this voluntarily to get out of debt.

Perhaps you're taking money out of the company as a distribution. It doesn't count as an expense, yet your bank account goes down, which is considered as negative cash flow. This could lead to some financial challenges down the road, or because it's your distributions and you're careful with your money, it may not have any negative effect at all.

This is where we all want to be—positive cash flow and positive profits. This is where you want to get to. It is a great place to be, and that's the goal of everything we do. Once you get there, don’t hesitate to do your happy dance because you’ve earned it.

As you’re starting your architecture and engineering firms, you are going out and taking all this risk. All that struggle should lead you to the point where you can be in that happy place and make an excellent living for yourself.

If you enjoyed this post and maybe even learned something, consider sharing it with your colleagues and associates. We want to help as many people and firms as possible reach high levels of success and profitability.

Though related, Profit and Cash Flow are different measures of how your firm is doing.

Profit vs. Cash Flow

Our overhead costs can creep up on us. They are basically robbing you of your profits. Follow the steps in this video to keep more of your hard-earned dollars in your pocket.

Painlessly Reduce Costs

You can use your data to identify your best clients and projects based on performance and profits. Here is a quick and easy analysis you can do.

Client Project Fit - How to Identify Your Best Match

It is not easy to juggle all of your projects. Getting a handle on scheduling will help a lot. Check out this video for some simple tips on how to do it.

Resource Scheduling

We try to share information that our team wishes they had known when founding and running their AE firms. In this post, we will share a personal experience and give some helpful information about how you can prevent incidents of embezzlement within your firm.

As we dive into this discussion, let's look at some statistics related to embezzlement.

33% of all corporate bankruptcies come as a result of employee theft, most of which are from embezzlement.

95% of all businesses have experienced theft.

It usually takes at least two years to detect embezzlement.

80% of embezzlement happens to small businesses.

Only 4% of those who embezzle have a prior conviction.

The average age of embezzlers is about 49.

There are many types of employee theft. Sometimes, your employees spend time at the office doing non-work-related things, but you still pay them for their time. They could also be designing their personal home and plotting their plans using your equipment without permission. In this post, we will focus on a particular type of employee theft called embezzlement, or the egregious stealing of your money.

If you think you're not going to get embezzled, think again. It's amazing how many cases of embezzlement happen every year. Everyone I know who experienced it never thought it would happen to them. When it happened to me, I didn't think it was going to happen.

Almost every business is facing theft. And it is almost always committed by somebody who's in control of the finances within the company - typically your bookkeeper or your office manager.

I spent two years on the grand jury, where I saw a few embezzlement cases the DA wanted to bring to trial. I also had money embezzled from me.

In fact, I had even warned our former bookkeeper that she might be able to steal from us. But if she did, I would catch her, and I would press charges. That's exactly what happened. We'll talk about this experience in a more detailed manner in the next blogs - how she stole the money, how we caught her, and what we did when we caught her.

A very good friend of mine who ran an electrical contracting company was embezzled by his bookkeeper. She took checks that were made out to the IRS, got them signed, and edited them in the typewriter. This was years ago - she retyped the I into an M, turning I-R-S into M-R-S, or Mrs, and then filled in her name. She did it for a year.

My friend's firm ended up going bankrupt over this, and it came at the same time as an error in a project that cost him money. When you don't pay your taxes, Uncle Same doesn't care how or why. Not only were they out of money, they still had to pay all those back taxes and penalties to the IRS.

An engineering client of ours had a bookkeeper embezzle at least $600k - they stropped looking at that point. When we were chatting about this case, they told me that one of their engineers has worked at 3 different firms and while he was working there all three had experienced embezzlement - no it wasn’t him.

My wife worked at a medical office for 15 years, where their bookkeeper embezzled money from her first week on the job. She worked there for about 20 years. That bookkeeper ended up stealing somewhere around half a million dollars.

One of the practices she did was claim that the insurance company forced them to write off some exposures. When she got the insurance payment, she just deposited the money in her account.

Another friend of mine ran an architecture firm here in town. They had their bookkeeper with them from the very beginning. They considered that person a very, very close family friend - they spent the holidays together. But she was robbing them blind. The same thing happened to an engineering firm I used to work with, but they didn't file police reports or press charges. They just fired her and told her to leave and never come back.

It's so common to have somebody very close doing it to you. It's almost always a trusted, long-time employee. It's somebody you don't expect. They're usually the ones that never complain - they stay late, they work weekends. They're that dedicated employee that's been building up trust with you. Enough trust that they can put their fingers on your finances. They're afraid to take time off because they have hidden secrets - the kind that can get exposed while they're gone. If you have an employee that doesn't want to take their vacation and go away for a week or two, look out - that could be a big red flag.

In my engineering firm, I could say that I was embezzled because, first of all, it was my fault. I let the opportunity be there. It took me a long time to admit it, but it was my fault - I should have had things in place to prevent embezzlement.

Our bookkeeper embezzled us for over five years. She started small, great it over time. We dug in and did all the forensics, and found about $95,000 of embezzlement. Fortunately, we recovered about 90% of the money she stole, which is extremely, extremely rare. You rarely get your money back.

She was cutting and writing checks to herself, but I did not review the bank statements, so I did not see the checks and credit card statements. I did not pay attention to how many dollars were going through my petty cash account.

You could be thinking that I'm an idiot. In hindsight, yes. We trusted her because things were going well. We were growing rapidly. I'd sign a stack of checks before rushing out of the office.

While I was sitting there signing a check, she would hand me one more, and I'd sign it quickly because she has to do that bill and I have to get to my meeting. We did not know that she would later put that last check into her drawer and use it later for herself.

We maintained a six-week cash flow forecast, so I always knew how much money was going to be in the bank. I also had other tools in place so I could monitor our cash flows.

Every once in a while, there would be a bit of an anomaly and I thought I was the one who was making a mistake. As it turns out, the anomaly came because she wrote checks to herself. She would then change the number of expenses on other things so we wouldn't detect what she was doing. The anomaly was a warning sign I ignored. I hope you don't make the same mistakes.

To make sure we don't get embezzled again, we needed to establish new rules - ones that would take away every opportunity for theft and discourage the behavior moving forward.

New Rule #1: All financial mail has to be delivered to you unopened.

When the bank statements arrive, you have to be the one to open them, so you can review them before you give them back to your bookkeeper or office manager.

Even if you don't review every statement, they wouldn't know, but they'd think you did. Just go through each piece of mail and make it look like you've reviewed each one. Plant the seed in their thoughts that you're keeping your finger on your finances.

This rule applies to credit card statements, client payments, and so much more. Take away the opportunity for anyone to embezzle from your firm. You have to be the one to take control of your company - have your financial mail delivered to you, open them up, and give them back.

This rule applies when they go shopping. Some employees might be buying all the school supplies for their kids on your dime. When they go out to get supplies or anything for your office, have the receipt come back to you so you can review it. Put this rule in place to make sure you take away every opportunity for any kind of employee theft to take place in your business.

Since the time we got embezzled, we haven't had petty cash because we discovered that it was a way to get funds out of the office. If you are going to have petty cash, make sure you go back to New Rule #2. Before you cut the check to replenish it, make sure you check all the receipts so you can still reduce the opportunity for anybody to embezzle.

If you're running a large firm, you might need to have two people do checks and balances. See to it that the person who receives income and records it into your software isn't the same person that goes to the bank to make deposits.

These are simple steps you can do to help prevent embezzlement. Incidents like these can weigh on you emotionally more than anything else. It's amazing how much of an effect it had on me and how I felt towards humanity as a whole.

If you found this post helpful, consider sharing it with your colleagues and associates. We want to help as many firms as we can avoid the challenges and tribulations we went through.
In our next blog, we’ll get into how our bookkeeper stole up to $100,000 from us over five years. Click 

Even the word embezzlement sounds terrible. In this three-part series, we will share the story of how it happened and how it might have been prevented.

Embezzlement Part 1: What To Do To Help Prevent Embezzlement

Here in part 2, we will tell you how it happened. Hopefully, this will give you insights that you can apply to your situation to prevent this from happening to you.

Embezzlement Part 2: How It Happened

In the last part of our series on Embezzlement, Doug Rawson talks about how he caught his former bookkeeper, what was done to gather evidence, and what happened to the bookkeeper after these events. But first, let's get into the story of what went down after Doug first discovered the embezzlement.

In 1995, we were in the process of selling our engineering firm. I had decided to go full-time into BaseBuilders. After doing both for a couple of years, I figured it was time to sell the firm to another electrical engineering firm.

I was looking at the balance sheet, and I noticed that there was a high balance in the petty cash account. It was something around $300. Remember, this was over 20 years ago so the recall may not be perfect. I went up to the front of the office and asked her why we had such a high balance. She said that she just hasn't had the time to reconcile, and she'd work on it right away. I walked away, and around the corner, I stopped and paused because I felt that something was a little off. I walked back up and told her, "you know what? Instead of doing that, why don't you just bring me those receipts?"

At that moment, I knew something was up - she was flush, and I could tell she got that sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. I just knew something was going on. I had no idea how big it was going to be. I just knew that she had stolen petty cash.

She replied, "okay, I'll get that all gathered up for you." I went back to my office, and 40 minutes later, she came in, sat down, and said, "Doug, I don't have the receipts."

She replied, "I just haven't been on top of it. I know I should have. That's my fault. I let stuff fall through the cracks. You know what? For any receipt that's not there, I'm just going to pay that money back. I shouldn't have let that happen. That's my fault, and I'm going to pay for it."

Who's going to say that? I knew that I had her dead to rights. I just said okay, that will do. She went ahead and did that. All of these happened near the end of the day. I just hung out in the office until the end of the day and waited for her to leave, knowing that things had gone awry.

I went and told my partner what was going on. I changed the password on QuickBooks immediately, so she couldn't go in and cook the books any more than she might have already done. We reached out to some colleagues of mine who are business owners themselves. I talked with them and they told me, "bar none. What you found was just the tip of the iceberg. Sure enough, it was.

That night, I stayed up until midnight. We started digging and found checks, missing receipts, and all kinds of things. We ended up with about $28,000 of embezzled funds that we were able to quickly identify in just a matter of a few hours.

In our previous post, we talked about how she did it, you can click here to read that part of the story.

The whole thing happened under our noses the entire time. If only we'd been looking, we would've found out. But we weren't because we trusted her, and the trust was betrayed.

I think most entrepreneurs commit the mistake of trusting other people to the detriment of their own businesses. I take full responsibility for what happened because I didn't have the checks in balances in place.

We had it all figured out, and when she came into work the next day, we called her up to the conference room. At this point, I think she realized that the jig was up.

Before she got into the room, I hid a tape recorder and I pressed record. In the state of Nevada, you can record any conversation as long as at least one member of the conversation agrees to the recording. I agreed.

We recorded our conversation with her. I presented things to her like a check that was made out to her for $250 that should not have been made out to her. I then asked her, "What is this?" And slid it over to her and she answered it.

She answered with a rising intonation, as if she's asking a question, "an advance?"

"An advance. Okay, so you were going to pay that money back?"

"Great. Who gave you permission to take that advance? Did my partner give you that permission?"

"You said you were planning to pay it back. Well, it's been several months since that check was written. How soon did you plan to pay it back?"

The conversation went like this over and over again as we went through multiple documents.

Before hiring her, I was doing the books. I spent two years on the grand jury in Washoe County, which is the county that Reno is in, and they have a sitting grand jury. The DA would bring cases in, present evidence, do this line of questioning, and then we would either give them a true bill or no true bill that would give them the right for the indictment so they could press charges and bring the case to court. I am well-versed in how to do the questioning because I spent two years working on these kinds of cases.

My experience with the grand jury really helped me in this situation. She had no idea we were recording the whole time. At the end of the conversation, I said, "you're fired. You're welcome to come in here and get your things. After a little while, you can come and get your final check."

Even when an employee is terminated for causes like these, you have to pay them their final check. That sucked.

My partner and I are playing good cop, bad cop. I was the bad cop. My partner kept telling her, "I'm trying to keep Doug from pressing charges. I don't want you to get into such a big mess. You could just pay this money back. We might sweep it under the rug and bygones will be bygones. It didn't take much convincing. She took the check, cashed it, and gave the money to us. Of course, that wasn't nearly enough to cover the amount she stole.

The next day, she came back with some additional funds. I think she and her husband got it out of their 401K, it might have been a life insurance policy. They cashed out several thousand dollars. Another day came and we found yet a whole bunch of evidence against her because I spent the day going through everything to get a good grasp of how bad the damage was.

I looked at her credit card and I saw a lot of purchases from Target. A lot of them didn't have receipts. What did our business need that was purchased at Target? Absolutely nothing. She was just shopping for herself. I don't even know that we discovered it all. You kind of get tired of digging after a while.

After I did the digging, I put together a very clear list. You could do this in a spreadsheet, but since I'm a database geek, I put them all in a database. In there, you can find every single charge that she made that was not needed in the company - every charge from Target, 711, the grocery store - everything I can find that wasn't intended for the company is in this list. I also added the checks she had written to herself. With the petty cash, we were out of luck because we didn't have receipts. We didn't know exactly where the cash went. That's one of the reasons why we don't know the final amount of money she stole, but we got up to over $90,000 of charges.

I put all the evidence together in a binder together with the recording of our conversations. I took everything to the police station to file a statement. When we met with the detective, he wasn't sure if he could work on the case right away because he was dealing with a lot of similar cases at that time. I presented my case anyway.

Our bookkeeper was getting ready to cash another large check, and we were counting on getting that money back. But the next day, a cop showed up at her door looking to question her.

During situations like these, it's important to do your homework and put the necessary evidence together. I organized the evidence and the recording so well that I presented the entire case to the detective without him having to do any work at all. But since they went and knocked on her door before she brought that money, we never got it back. I think she used that money to hire an attorney. I don't blame her. I would have also hired an attorney if I were in trouble. I just wish we got paid first.

We went through the entire system, from the police to the attorneys to the DA. They did get an arrest warrant, but they didn't go completely in. She hadn't gone to trial yet, but she did get a warrant. I got to see the booking photos, and by this time, she had moved out of the state, but she was told that she needed to come in and turn herself in. She did exactly that - she was arrested, booked, and released on her own recognizance. She was not a threat to society, and she returned to the state to turn herself in when the time came.

When we went to justice court to get ready for a trial. Her attorney met with the district attorney, and they did a plea bargain. We had a bit of a say in this bargain. Turns out, her parents and grandparents pooled together $65,000 as payback to us. In exchange for this payment, the charges would be dropped from a felony to a gross misdemeanor.

There was a big part of me that wanted to say no to the money and have her do time in jail. But the district attorney talked us out of it - our jails are full and she's not violent. We reluctantly agreed, took the money, and called it a day.

When we did go to court, I talked to the judge to say my peace. I was very teary-eyed, it was a very emotional time in my life - being taken advantage of like that always is.

We got 90% of our money back, we got $10,000 from our general liability insurance. In total, we got around $85,000 back. I know she took over $100,000 because we found around $92,000 of stolen funds without doing too much work.

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