Operating in the Caribbean

Your clearing agent bills you three weeks after the container cleared. By then some of the goods have sold. That freight and duty will attach to whatever is still on the shelf and to nothing that has already gone — so the margin you reported on the fastest-moving lines is the one that was most wrong.

How many suppliers you can keep active is governed by your plan, and switching one on at the limit is refused outright. An ordinary commercial arrangement, and an unusual thing to write about — which is why it is better read here than met mid-migration.

A register tells you a certificate expired last month. A control stops the order. Almost every organisation has the first and believes it has the second.

A till session records a float, every cash drop, the expected cash, the counted cash and the variance, with who opened and who closed. It is a proper reconciliation. It does not stop the cashier seeing the expected figure before they count.

You win the export contract on a Tuesday. From that Tuesday the distinction is a property of your invoice lines — and a system holding a rate per document has already lost it.

Saint Lucia charges 12.5%, 10% or 7% depending on what is sold and who sells it — and "who" is settled by counting bedrooms. Five or more and you are a hotel. Four and you are not, on the same street, selling the same night. A hotel guest's folio carries three rates before breakfast.

Every system provisions a tax rate from a country, because almost everywhere the country is the unit. Where it is a sector instead, a correct-looking configuration is wrong for your whole business.

For an exporter the tax balance is a receivable rather than a liability — often a large one, managed with less rigour than a debtor a tenth of its size.

Six independent countries share the East Caribbean dollar and charge four different rates of VAT. No conversion, no revaluation, one price list — so nothing in a finance system signals that a second market exists, and the safeguard that stops it adding unlike currencies is exactly what hides six separate tax positions.

A stocktake here does not change your stock. It raises adjustments somebody has to approve — so a counter can report what they counted and cannot set the record. The best decision in the module, and the three things it stops short of.

When part of an order never turns up, the freight you already paid has to be carried by the goods that did. Ours divided by what was ordered instead — so a shipment arriving forty per cent short left every unit you actually held costed ten per cent under what it cost you. Where the balance never follows, that error never corrects itself.

The hard compliance question here is procurement, not tax. Ask what the system does on the day a supplier certificate expires, and whether anybody verifies it — the plain no is the good answer.

Write down every rate you actually charge before you look at a system. If the list has more than one entry, most tax configuration screens have no shape for your business — including ours.

A project here can pay the people who worked on it, through a document with its own reference, approval and posting date. That is a second way of paying somebody, running beside payroll, and neither one knows about the other.

The breach alarm notifies the agent, then their manager, then the department — the right ladder in an organisation that has one. For a six-person business we can configure a flatter path, so the alert reaches somebody positioned to act on it.

An employee record here does not require a user account, and that is deliberate — in most of the businesses this was built for, a majority of staff have never logged into anything. Every account-shaped feature therefore covers a minority of your people.

For about a year our aging report summed unlike currencies into one unlabelled figure. The repair was easy; deciding what a single honest total looks like was not — and the convention we landed on has a weakness we would rather publish than hide.

The list was built where the business started, and it goes out unchanged to the other islands because nothing in the transaction suggests otherwise — same currency, same language, same group. Everything else has changed.

Most operational risk arrives without an appointment, so condition records are treated as housekeeping. A storm season is annual, dated and known — there is a "before", it is on the calendar, and the record you create in it is the one nobody can reconstruct afterwards.