Dear Diary,
This is a story of a scrap dealer, who has to make payroll while meeting Responsible Recycler standards in an international marketplace. This is all true, all happening in the past two weeks.
Monday... We are still dealing with the aftermath of a missed wire transfer from a USA client. We took the wire (about $60K) for granted and wrote some big checks against it. Someone at the sender's local bank claimed to be asleep at the switch (though I think it should be investigated whether the money was withdrawn from the client account on the day of the wire, and the bank was kiting it for 24 hours). Bank fraud can mean the bank's fraud. We were hit with about $1600 in bounced check fees and panicked phone calls with our own payees. I took screen shots of our account showing the wire was late and the correspondence from the client sending us the money that their account had cleared it the day earlier.
Rachael, our CFO, makes the case that the wires are outrageous, taking $20-30 from the sender client and then $18 at our receiving bank... wonders whether we should use more paper checks to avoid the accumulated bank fees.
Tuesday: To make up for the panic among our suppliers for the bounced checks the previous Friday (one of our loads was actually held and not unloaded until we sent another wire to cover the bad check, truck idling), we issue more checks to get the payables under 30 days. To do that I need to sell some of the $150K in scrap metal that we have processed in the building.
Wednesday: We re-double sort the green board to eliminate the "jelly bean" boards (yellow, purple, red, and blue boards typically made in China and typically having much less gold content), to get a better price than our last load sent to the R2 compliant buyer. That takes extra staff time, and it's part of the reason we have so much metal value in inventory that I now desperately need to cash out. The high grade printed circuit boards had been processed by our USA buyer for sale to Umicore or Boliden in Belgium or Dowa in Japan... it takes 90-120 days for our buyer to get the reconciliation on their load, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
They evidently got some loads back with way less gold than they expected and were told that the culprit was "jelly bean" boards. They factored their loss over average loads going forward, and my company took a $6,000 hit. They admitted they didn't know whose boards had how many jelly beans, it was an average spread out to cover their losses.
This is a story of a scrap dealer, who has to make payroll while meeting Responsible Recycler standards in an international marketplace. This is all true, all happening in the past two weeks.
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| China 2005 |
Rachael, our CFO, makes the case that the wires are outrageous, taking $20-30 from the sender client and then $18 at our receiving bank... wonders whether we should use more paper checks to avoid the accumulated bank fees.
Tuesday: To make up for the panic among our suppliers for the bounced checks the previous Friday (one of our loads was actually held and not unloaded until we sent another wire to cover the bad check, truck idling), we issue more checks to get the payables under 30 days. To do that I need to sell some of the $150K in scrap metal that we have processed in the building.
Wednesday: We re-double sort the green board to eliminate the "jelly bean" boards (yellow, purple, red, and blue boards typically made in China and typically having much less gold content), to get a better price than our last load sent to the R2 compliant buyer. That takes extra staff time, and it's part of the reason we have so much metal value in inventory that I now desperately need to cash out. The high grade printed circuit boards had been processed by our USA buyer for sale to Umicore or Boliden in Belgium or Dowa in Japan... it takes 90-120 days for our buyer to get the reconciliation on their load, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
They evidently got some loads back with way less gold than they expected and were told that the culprit was "jelly bean" boards. They factored their loss over average loads going forward, and my company took a $6,000 hit. They admitted they didn't know whose boards had how many jelly beans, it was an average spread out to cover their losses.
