Employee Call Off Log Template: Fill & Download for Free

Well, they won’t have it just sitting around, but they will most likely have it locked up somewhere in the building- the cash is called petty cash. The amount would vary depending on the company: please find below an explanation of petty cashPetty cash and you: how to manage this small fundBy John Shieldsmith May 28, 2019[Keeping a small amount of cash in your office or at your store makes it much easier for office managers, bookkeepers, and supervisors to cover occasional small purchases or expenses.But first, what is petty cash exactly? Petty cash is a small amount of money for small expenses. Most people use petty cash for things like buying office supplies, paying for postage, and so on. Petty cash is a common form of imprest system (I.E. financial accounting system), and is a pre-designated amount that’s built into the budget and replenished after a set period of time or when it runs out.While petty cash is a relatively small amount of money, it can be easily stolen or abused if you don’t handle it right.So, is it worth having petty cash on hand? Or are you better off finding a different method?The dos and don’ts of petty cashAs mentioned, petty cash can make things nice and convenient but does carry certain risks. The bad news is that there will always be risks with petty cash. The good news? If you follow some best practices, you can reduce the risks that come with petty cash, and protect yourself and your employees. Here are some dos and don’ts to help you cover your bases.Do: designate a reasonable dollar amountEstablish a starting dollar balance for the petty cash fund. This should be small enough that employees won’t be tempted to steal it but large enough that you don’t have to replenish it too often. Pick a dollar amount you think will cover small office expenses for a month or so. A petty cash fund between $100 and $500 is sufficient for many small businesses.Do: specify what it can be spent onIn his article for the Institute of Internal Auditors, bank auditor Umair Danka notes that there’s a significant risk of petty cash being spent on non-business activities. To combat this, make sure your employees understand upfront what petty cash can and can’t be spent on.Petty cash is often used to make change for customers and pay for small, erratic expenses that pop up. These expenses could be things like office supplies, a small repair, and so on.Put your petty cash policy in writing and offer some examples of appropriate expenses. For example, petty cash may be used to purchase additional postage, paper towels, coffee, or other basic office supplies. You can also mandate that all petty cash transactions be under a certain dollar amount, like $25.Do: require employees to account for expensesPetty cash isn’t usually a significant expense for your business. However, failing to hold employees accountable for petty cash may encourage theft or inappropriate use of company resources.Require that employees maintain a running petty cash log for every transaction, including receipts. Each entry in the petty cash book should include the date, the amount, and what was purchased with the petty cash. Review your petty cash register before you replenish the petty cash fund.Furthermore, keep a Microsoft Excel doc or other spreadsheets that track who spent what, when it was spent, and the total amount of spending for both the month and year to date. Not only will this help you hold employees accountable, but it will also ensure you’re more prepared at tax time.If you need help getting a petty cash log started, look up some free petty cash log templates to do some of the work for you.Don’t: give all employees petty cash accessIf every employee has access to petty cash, bad or nonexistent record keeping usually results. Instead, designate one employee to be responsible for the petty cash fund. That person, generally known as a petty cash custodian or petty cashier, will determine if an expense is appropriate, hand out the cash to employees who need it, and ensure the expense log is kept up-to-date.If your company is larger, you may need to have more than one fund custodian. No matter what, ensure anyone with that title and responsibility is trustworthy and loyal to the company.Ideally, people in this role will be comfortable handling business expenses and have experience with financial statements. Those with prior financial accounting experience are especially great with this, but anyone that’s handled expense accounts should be fine.Don’t: leave the cash unsupervisedPetty cash is a highly liquid asset, which means that it’s easily stolen. Even if you trust your employees, cash left out on a table or desk could be stolen by an office visitor or a customer. To combat this risk, keep the petty cash in a locked filing cabinet or cash box. Only you and the employee designated to oversee the fund should have the keys.Don’t: leave petty cash off your booksPetty cash is a small amount of money, but it adds up quickly as it’s replenished. To track the cash, create a petty cash account in the asset section of your chart of accounts. When you’re ready to replenish the fund, record the expenses in your accounting software based on the petty cash expense log. Then, record the replenishment by debiting the petty cash account and crediting the bank account you used to refill the fund.If you’re running a proper log as mentioned above, you’ll also be able to easily gather up your petty cash vouchers and cross-reference them with your books to ensure things are accurate. This will set you up for success, not a petty cash accounting nightmare.Don’t: continue replenishing your petty fund without evaluating spendingIf you find yourself regularly replenishing your petty fund there could be a larger problem at hand. Every time you replenish your fund, look over the spending log to see where the money’s going. If there are any odd transactions or the numbers don’t add up, you could be looking at theft. In this case, you might want to consider installing a camera or taking away access until you figure out who’s stealing.Establishing the Petty Cash System1Purchase a lockbox. When you are starting a petty cash fund, you need to buy a lockbox that will hold the cash available for use and the receipts for what has been spent. You need a small, metal box that can easily fit within a desk drawer. This box can either have a combination lock or have a key lock, depending on what is best for your particular office. Either way, it needs to be extremely secure to deter people from tampering with the box. You need to have a box big enough to keep all the money and receipts in, but small enough to be inconspicuous and easily hid. Make sure you get one with a money tray so the bills and change can be easily organized.[2]These are available in most stationery or office supply stores.If everything adds up and you’re simply burning through petty cash regularly, evaluate your spending and look for areas to cut. For example, if you’re buying tons of office supplies week after week, maybe you should look into bulk ordering the supplies to cut down on spending.No more problems with petty cashProperly tracking petty expenses and ensuring you have a healthy, accurate cash balance isn’t so bad when you follow the tips above. If you find you almost never make cash payments, you could also consider opening a business credit card that’s specifically for petty-level expenses, but again, consult with an accountant first to ensure your score won’t take a hit.Remember: maintain a balance sheet, track all petty cash expenditures, and never think a payment is too small to be tracked. Follow all of these steps, and you can become the petty cash payment master in no time.]MATT LEEUpdated Oct 11, 2019[If you have ever looked over a company's balance sheet, you have no doubt noticed the first account under the current asset section is cash and cash equivalents. The cash account contains, as the name suggests, all of the company's cash, while the cash equivalents account represents highly liquid investments the company can convert to cash within a few days. The cash that is listed as such on the company's books will be stored in a bank account, or within an equivalent financial institution, from which the company is then able to pay its liabilities and other expenses. Where DWhere Else Cash is KeptThe company may also keep a small amount of cash in its office for smaller office-related expenses. These small amounts of cash kept on-premises for day-to-day use is called petty cash, and would also be recorded in the cash account on the balance sheet.The cash equivalents that a company may carry on its books are short-term investments that are highly liquid. The cash equivalents are considered to be just like cash simply because they can be quickly liquidated and converted into cash at a fair price within a matter of days.Other Ways to Stash CashA company's cash equivalents account contains any and all short-term investments that are able to be sold at a reasonable price to provide needed cash within short turnaround time. So, if a company wants to use some of its cash equivalents in order to pay some of its bills, it has the option of selling some of its cash equivalents and using the proceeds to achieve this goal. Examples of cash equivalents include money market accounts and Treasury bills, also called T-bills.o Companies Keep Their CashA money market account is very similar to a bank account, but the interest that a company can earn on this account is slightly higher. There may be some restrictions imposed on the firm for using a money market account, such as a maximum number of transactions within the account during a specified period, or even minimum deposit requirements.Treasury bills can also provide the company with another alternative to keeping cash a regular bank account. T-bills are government debt issues that are sold at periodic intervals. As T-bills can be resold within a public market at any time by the company, they are highly liquid, which allows them to also be classified as cash equivalents.]

So far as I know, most states don't have any laws pertaining to what positively identifies a law enforcement officer. Some states require certain identifiers on a uniform, such as badges having to display either the wearer's name or an assigned number, or that uniformed officers wear name badges or cloth embroidered strips. I've never seen such a regulation for plainclothes officers.It's a good idea to know what both the badges and ID cards from your local agencies look like. Few agencies will publish this information, as that would provide a template for counterfeiters. However, any member of that agency should show you their badge and ID card on request. ID cards for other employees will follow a similar format.My retired officer ID is a sealed plastic format, where the information and photo are printed directly onto the plastic. It has my name, "Retired Officer" below that, a mug shot photo, and the name and seal (actually, a slightly amended drawing of the agency's badge) of the agency. It also has the name and signature of the man who was the chief of police when I got it. As it happens, that was two chiefs ago, but the back of the card indicates that the ID is non-expiring.The back has my date of birth, blood type, height and weight, my date of first appointment, and my file number is both text and barcode. The file number is sequentially assigned to everyone who is fingerprinted by my department. The number before mine might belong to a cab driver, the one after to an arrested felon. The cops and everyone else are mixed in with the others.What standard is expected is something of a "reasonable person" standard, I imagine. If I show you a badge proclaiming I'm a junior forest ranger with an ID card drawn in crayon, most reasonable people would perceive those as fakes. However, counterfeit credentials that would pass casual inspection are not too hard to come by, especially if you don't know what the real ones look like.A former acquaintance represented to me and a lot of other people that he was a former officer of a medium-sized police department in Michigan. He had photos of himself in uniform, baseball-type trading cards (there are popular in some communities) with his photo and name, a badge, various t-shirt and sweatshirts with the agency logo, etc. He also talked the talk very well. As it turned out, he was a reserve officer with that agency for a very short time before his repeated episodes of misconduct (which included an off duty running gun battle in a housing project, chasing a guy he thought was a gang member, and a later charge of impersonating a police officer) got him kicked to the curb. The agency was unsuccessful in getting back all of their materials, and he ran this for all it was worth.In another episode, he was working out at a neighborhood gym in ABC City, with various police logo items in plain view. When asked, he told everyone he was a member of the ABC police department, one that had maybe 75 officers. The game was up when another gym rat replied, "That's strange. I'm also a member of the ABC police department, and I don't recognize you." The latter guy was legit; the former guy came close to getting arrested.Before knowing this guy, I would have said you should easily be able to tell a real cop from an impostor with a few well-crafted questions, but this has taught me that some people can play that game well enough to fool me and a lot of other people.When in doubt, call the dispatch center and ask, "Is _______ __________ a real cop with your agency, and is he logged out here as talking to me?"

I worked for a tiny piece-of-shit company just after my daughter was born because we needed the money I couldn’t find anything better in the local area at the time.It was run by a husband and wife and the actual premises were the basement of their house. Altogether there were about 7 employees, but not everyone was there at once. My job was to create flyers and leaflets, and to maintain their shitty website. It really isn’t my training - I’m an engineer, but as I said I needed the money, and I knew how to use the software (InDesign), and build websites. I was totally overqualified.I negotiated a 3-day working week, paid pro-rata, and the ‘rata’ salary wasn’t in itself very good. So it turned out I didn’t get paid that much. The person I took over the job from was useless - his library of leaflets were really badly organised, with masses of duplicated work, because he didn’t know how to make templates and master sheets. So my first task was to clean up all that mess. It was the same story on the website - there were no style sheets, no server-side macros to reuse common page elements, or anything. Every damn page was a full copy of the company ‘look’, so to make a change across the site (like a change to a header colour) needed a change to every single page.Eventually I rewrote the site with style sheets and server-side code, integrated a database of all the company products so that online sales catalogues were automatically updated when stock changed. I reorganised all the leaflets. It was an intense amount of work, but when it was done, I found that the amount of needed day-to-day work was really very small, because now the code and resources were organised properly, and had a good deal of automation, so even big changes took little time.The wife (COO) was used to my predecessor working his balls off all hours to keep up with the work - and no wonder, because he was a dick. So she thought I must be slacking as I had so little to do. I didn’t like that any more than she did - I like to be busy! So she started feeding me lots of pointless little changes just to keep me occupied, but that was OK, I could keep up no problem. I became frustrated, but kept myself busy in various ways. One of these was to explore new stuff about server-side coding to help improve the site further, automate more, and to give myself skills that I might be able to use elsewhere when I left this dump. To do this I made a copy of a personal website I ran on my local machine, and published it as a website on the local network. This allowed me to test ideas in a private environment, with my personal machine used as a server, and could test on other machines they had. When I developed something useful, I’d test it on the private copy of their website, using the same arrangement. Once debugged, I uploaded it to our public server.At this time they decided they needed a proper server for all of the company data, and since I seemed to know a bit about that, I was asked if I could help. After a number of meetings, they agreed to adopt my proposal, which was for a central server with Active Directory, running virtual desktops. Each employee would log in from any terminal and get the same personal desktop they set up themselves. A proper hierarchical permissions system would allow access to common data based on roles within groups, with the company owners having full access to everything. A lot of this IT type stuff was new to me, so I had to learn a lot about it and quickly, but I managed, at least to the point where the fairly small system we’d agreed on could be implemented. We had a mixed Windows/Mac setup, so I used MacOSX Server with SAMBA to support the Windows side. At the time, the Mac XServe was a very cost effective machine, with easy admin tools, so that’s what we went for.I had to work really hard to get it all working, and gave up several full weekends to get all the hardware installed and running, and configured. This was time I’d much rather have spent at home with my baby daughter, but I did it anyway, because I wanted to prove to them I was more useful than a leaflet writer. I didn’t get paid for any of this extra time.So the system is rolled out, and immediately Madam gets angry because it’s slightly different from what she was used to. (Previously everyone stored their own work locally, not backed up in any way, and if stuff needed to be shared it was copied peer-to-peer as needed. We needed some time to get everyone to migrate their local copies to the server, get rid of all the non-canonical copies, and so forth.) The whole point of the exercise was to migrate to a centralised server with offsite backups (I set all that up too) to avoid all this ad-hoc copying and potentially disastrous loss of data. They obviously recognised the need for it, but when it was given to them, it was resisted with a vengeance.It was all about power. Madam was in charge and let you know about it. She even hen-pecked her husband all the time. The all-out rows it occasionally blew up into was embarrassing to say the least. She power dressed in an old-fashioned way with shoulder pads and big 80s hair (I think she hadn’t realised the 80s had been and gone 20 years before). She wore far too much makeup. She was in her 50s and it was a serious case of mutton dressed as lamb. None of this is relevant to her behaviour or competency as such, but you get the picture. It’s fair to say that she and I struggled to get along. I worked my butt off and did a damned good job for them, and though it was clear that none of it was appreciated by her in any way, I still did it, because that’s what I do!Anyway, she really didn’t like the changes, even though she’d wrought them, and I copped a lot of passive-aggressive (and not-so passive) anger while she adjusted to the new system, blaming me for every irritation she encountered. She would argue about grammatical changes I’d made to copy she’d given me to turn into leaflets. I’d made it correct, but she didn’t know her grammar, so she thought I was in the wrong. I would point out as best I could why I’d changed it, but she’d just get angry and told me to do as she’s told me and stop being such a smart-arse. Fair enough, if she was happy to let the company look like ignorant peasants, it wasn’t my problem. One time in one of these arguments she told me if I didn’t like it I could fuck off - people like me were ten a penny. I almost did quit on the spot.Anyway, let’s get to the point. I worked part time, so one Monday morning a few weeks after the server rollout I’m in the supermarket with my by-now 18-month-old and she’s throwing a bit of a tantrum. I’m trying to get her calmed down and people are staring at me on all sides when my phone rings. It’s Madam Himmler. “Where is the work I asked you to complete by Friday!?” she demanded. “On the server, where all the publication work is, as normal.” I told her the folder where she could find publications for approval, even though she should have been well aware of it as it had been in use for several weeks by then. “Well, I can’t be bothered with all that crap now, I need to log in and get it off your machine. What’s your password?” I told her she didn’t need my password, it was accessible using her own password - she had full access to all of the server data, and that copying it off my machine was a big part of what we were trying to avoid by having the server system at all. I’m also still trying to calm my toddler, who is wreaking havoc in the vegetable section. I told her this really wasn’t a good time, I was in the supermarket with a screaming baby and could she call me back? After all it was my day off. A further torrent of verbal abuse followed, then she slammed the phone down. That was a common thing she did actually, I’m sure she thought she was being a tough cookie, instead of, as was reality, just an arsehole.Anyway, by the time I get home, there’s an email from her to my personal home account. It’s an ultimatum. Either I hand over my password or I’m sacked. I call her up, and she’s still angry. I try and calmly reiterate that she doesn’t need my password, but she’s adamant. It gradually becomes clear that why she really wants it is to check on my machine to see if I’ve been doing anything I shouldn’t have been, in company time. I was fairly sure there was nothing much to find, though I did sometimes use Facebook when I had nothing to do. I wasn’t concerned, but I did feel pretty annoyed at her suspiciousness, her lack of appreciation for all the time I’d given up to help them unpaid, and her self-appointed ‘right’ to snoop on me. So I dug my heels in and outright refused, on principle. So she sacked me. I told her that was fine, but since she’d sacked me rather than forcing me to quit, she would be hearing from my solicitor about an unfair dismissal case.I was pretty angry. On the one hand I was glad to be free of the place, because it really did suck, but on the other I felt hard done by because I’d been treated like shit, and all the effort I’d put into that company counted for nothing. Oh well, lesson learned. I did consult my solicitor and he said I did have an excellent case, but on examining the best possible outcomes, it seemed unlikely I’d gain much compensation, and I certainly didn’t want reinstatement. So I didn’t follow through.There was more though. I mentioned that I’d copied my personal website (and theirs) to my local machine as a testing ground for server-side coding. Well, some time later I needed to obtain an official document from them for government tax records, and on there as ‘reason for dismissal’ she’d written an extensive explanation of how I had been using the company’s servers to host my own website and that was embezzlement as all of the bandwidth charges were paid by the company. It was laughably wide of the mark. Obviously they had managed to get into my machine in the end, and that was all they’d found that shouldn’t have been there, except that the reason it was there was never asked. She’d put 2 and 2 together and come up with about 500. I rang her up and told her that what she’d written on the form was untrue, and that she would have to reissue the document with that part blank, or else it was legal time again. I tried to explain to her but it was pointless - she was technically illiterate and didn’t understand the difference between a local network and the internet. I got my signed blank form.I kept an eye on their website for a while, and noted with some satisfaction that whoever took over from me was another of those incompetent (ten-a-penny no doubt) types that didn’t understand style sheets or anything much. The website got worse and worse and worse, where all the carefully set up consistency I’d put in place gradually disappeared. They probably also had problems on the IT side, since they’d sacked the only person who knew how it all worked without a proper handover, though actually it was a simple system and largely ran itself, so who knows?Getting sacked was the best thing to happen. I set up my own company to develop apps I wanted to make, and that’s been running almost 10 years now. I also vowed I would never work for a company that underemployed me, or which I was overqualified for, ever again. All the competencies you have in hand count for nothing if you are not there to exercise them.