Agents work all hours

Had a call at 8.30pm last night. Let it go to voicemail, we'd only got back 5 minutes before from seeing our daughter in ICU after her heart surgery. It was the agent for one of the cafes we've made an offer to buy. He faxed me a basic P&L statement for the three months to end December the other day after I made it clear a while back that we would not consider reviewing our offer without more financial documentation.

I told him we weren't in a position to do anything while our daughter was in hospital.

The P&L is only of limited use. I don't know for sure, but it feels just a fraction contrived. The revenue is almost exactly the sum of three months of the admitted weekly takings. I can't quite get the rent to line up with the previously advised amount. And there's an expense line called 'tax office expense', which is pretty odd, given tax payments are balance sheet not P&L issues. Either someone doesn't understand the most basic accounting and they really are paying tax; or someone doesn't understand the most basic accounting and they've whacked an amount in to make it look like they're paying tax.

Even more curious, the 'tax office payment' doesn't make sense in context of the revenue. If it's supposed to be their GST payments then it should be approximately 10% of their GST applicable revenue. Which they've kindly documented by splitting revenue into 'sales' and 'sales non GST'. The 'tax expense' is 1/5th of the GST that would be liable based on their professed revenue. The P&L normally wouldn't of course have GST included at all, I'm only playing the numbers this way because of the 'tax office expense' line.

It's also a very small P&L - only a dozen expense lines or so. Which I always worry about. Real expense statements tend to have a bunch of lines to cover all the weird and wonderfuls that turn up in a business. Where's the good old 'miscellaneous'!

Of course there's also no staff expenses at all in the P&L. Which begs the question - how do they pay themselves? Or are they working for free? I suppose they could be waiting for end of the year to collect dividends but something tells me that we're back to the good old cash system.