When you are doing work for a business, you often have to complete the work and then wait for a payment after a few days.

What would you do if one of your vendors was upset about having to wait for payment, and after he complained about it, you decided to look more closely at the work he was doing for you?

That is what happened to the construction manager in this story, and once he looked into it, he discovered that the vendor was screwing them out of thousands of dollars for many years.

You’re right, you are never working with me again.

Back about seven years ago I was promoted to office manager of a small construction company.

I inherited a very messy role, the previous office manager was disorganized and technologically disadvantaged.

When I came into the role I was brand new to the type of work, but I have always been very detail oriented.

I didn’t understand the vendor or inventory process, so I immediately began to log EVERYTHING I could so I would be able to make reports/understand it all.

Ok, weird request, but no big deal.

Fast forward about 2 months into the role and the owner of the company informs me he only wants to sign checks one day a week.

Essentially we would inform our vendors that any invoices received Friday-Thursday at noon would have a check cut and signed on Friday.

I’m sure some of them would be upset.

I am not sure if this is standard anywhere else, but judging by a few vendors’ reactions it wasn’t in this industry.

Understandable, we are talking about truck drivers who go and pick up a load of material, pay for it, then deliver it to the job or our yard.

So, if they do that Friday, turn in the invoice, they are out 500-1000 dollars until the next Friday.

They were used to being paid within 1-2 days and some of these guys live paycheck to paycheck. It wasn’t ideal for them.

It’s not like there was much they could do.

I sent out an email to the vendors and explained the processes.

While not all of them were happy, no one had too much of an issue with it.

I gave them, I think, like two weeks of notice before the policy would begin? Plus we had worked with all of them for years, they knew we were good for the money.

Then there was this one vendor.

Not everyone is happy about it.

He stated it was going to be a headache. I apologized, explained this was the new policy and we couldn’t adjust. He accepted it, I thought, and we moved on.

Cue three or four weeks later, he calls me in a hissy fit because he needs his check NOW. I apologized, explained to him that his check was going to be signed the next day (this was a Thursday), as per our policy and told him my hands were tied.

Wow, he was really mad.

He hung up on me and called my coworker (Project Manager). He was screaming into the phone, which, since we were in the same tiny office, meant I heard every word.

It ended with: “I won’t work with that jerk from here on out! I will only talk with you!”.

…oh really? That is how it is?

This guy is always trouble.

Well, here is the thing. Like I said, I am pretty detail oriented. The product he delivered to our yard was consistently off.

My system would say we have 100 yards of it, but my super would be asking for three more loads (45 yards each) because the back had roughly 10 yards left.

I had brought up the issue with the owner and super, we had established a new protocol that our personal crew truck drivers needed to fill out papers every day to show what they were taking to projects.

Something’s not right.

I was keeping track of every yard and sure, there should have been some loss, but 100 yards?

I had always assumed it was a shortage on our end. That we were overusing this material, or they weren’t tracking their loads to jobs correctly, or we were measuring it incorrectly in the back – probably a combination of the three.

After being called a jerk though…

Something’s not adding up.

I called one of my vendors who delivered a different material and asked him if he could deliver this material. I told him how much we got (45 yards a truck, usually 3 truck loads every other week, for blank cost) and he was bewildered.

He goes “How is that guy matching that cost? That is unbelievably low.”

Then he asked me who the vendor was. He tells me “That guy’s truck can’t carry more than 20 yards.” And when I was hesitant to believe this, he added “Do you get weight receipts?”

I had never heard of weight receipts. Again, I was an absolute baby in this industry. No one had trained me. However, I HAD noticed that every other vendor had a weight written on their invoices (something I had logged but never paid too close attention to because we measured in yardage, not tonnage.

This guy has been screwing them for a very long time.

There were some items that I would convert to yards because they only gave me weight, but then most had yards AND tonnage notated), while this guy always turned in a handwritten ticket that said “45 yards”.

This is how it had always been. The office manager before me would order 3 loads of 45 yards of material.

Something shady is going on.

It would be delivered in the back. I don’t think she would tell the back how much should be there and I certainly never did either, not until I started to notice the discrepancies.

Not until I started creating processes to fix the discrepancies.

Favorite vendor goes on to say “Hey, I know the yard he picks up from. I pick up ‘different’ material there and am friendly with them. They should have copies of the receipts. I am going to try to get them for you.”

This other vendor seems very helpful.

He asked what day our last delivery was.

I give him the details. Despite liking this vendor I was pretty skeptical- surely he just wants my business and wants me to pay more.

Still, I couldn’t lie and say I wasn’t curious if what he was saying was right.

This is definitely the order.

That day he texts me some photos of the receipts. Sure enough, that vendor’s name is on them. The date matches. The driver’s name matches (I hadn’t shared that). The timestamps even matched from how long the drive from this yard to our yard was/when he arrived according to my cameras.

So…he was picking up ONLY TWENTY YARDS of the material each time.

He was overcharging us 75 yards each time we ordered/paid. Which is how he was giving us such a “deal”. (It turns out the owner had demanded previous office manager negotiate this “Deal”.)

I dug up all our past dealings with him, unfortunately previous office manager had not kept receipts so I only had past checks in our system to go off of.

I would guess it would be even more.

We had worked with this guy for years.

Potentially it was tens of thousands of dollar in theft, but without receipts/weight receipts, there wasn’t much we could do except not work with him anymore.

I asked favorite vendor for his price. I checked around with other vendors, found it to be a decent price. Started to order from him from there on out.

He’s lucky he isn’t in jail.

So yeah. That guy never worked with “that jerk” again. He got what he wanted.

He reached out to coworker a few times when we stopped ordering, coworker told him each time “Talk to Office Manager.”

He called me once, but I didn’t answer. He had said he never wanted to talk to me again either, so, he got his wish.

If that guy would have just been quiet about the change in payment policy, he would have still been getting away with his little scam. Some people are just never happy.

Let’s see what the people in the comments have to say about this.

Yup, vendors just have to deal with this type of thing.

I bet this commenter is right.

Yes, it is essential.

Most people would never have known.

Things were crazy in the past.

He should have kept his foolish mouth shut.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.