Gerry: The bosses panicked as you might imagine, and we had to work all kinds of overtime to solve the problems.
Tom: That’s what’s happening now. There was a huge deficit that no one had spotted.
Gerry: How on earth did that happen?
Tom: It was all to do with the cash flow. A new employee recorded the sales when they came in, not
when they were cleared at the bank. That’s how they used to do it at her old place.
Gerry: I’m surprised no one noticed. How will you get around that problem?
Tom: We have to go back over everything, put in the new data and information, and then redo the calculations.
         The shareholders will not be pleased.
Gerry: Does that mean there’ll be losses this year?
Tom: Hopefully not, but we may have to pay a fine for late taxes. What happened in your case?
Gerry: Our audit showed that goods costing $20,000 were excluded from the ending inventory.
Tom: Wow!
Gerry: The selling price was $30,000, and the goods were shipped in December, but the transaction was not recorded.
Tom: That does sound messy.
Gerry: Yes. It took several weeks to finally get cleared. We were accused of creative accounting.
Tom: Well, it could have been worse; it could have been 200,000.
Gerry: Yes, that’s what I said!
Tom: Well I’d better be going, Gerry. Nice to see you.
Gerry: Good to see you, too, Tom. I hope it all gets cleared up. Bye.
Tom: Me too. Bye.

The two men, perhaps previously colleagues but obviously in the same line of work, were discussing financial problems mostly concerned with cash flow recording. The dialog gives some good examples of how the financial vocabulary can be used in the day-to-day working environment.

One of them mentions ‘creative accounting’, which is an expression used to describe recording accounts in a way that is not totally accurate, perhaps with an aim to defraud.