What is the name of your state (only U.S. law)? NH
Recently I was doing bookkeeping/office support for 3 years for a friend. The business grew exponentially, and went from 2 hours a week maintaining finances on an excel spreadsheet among other office tasks, to setting up and building Quickbooks files for vendors, customers, items, inventory and services over the last 6 months. They did not want me to work more than 2 or so hours a week and constantly told me they could not afford more. I did the bare minimum in that time frame, but the amount of work grew tremendously, they were never able to discuss my tasks with them, and actually told me at one time "not to come to them with every little thing on my mind." I had been sending email updates, and continued to do so, assuming they would want to be kept abreast of what I was spending my time doing. After a number of months, the job was literally impossible to keep up with, and the tension and stress was unbearable. I gave my notice, and they had me train another employee who did have Quickbooks experience. Two days later, one of the owners told me that instead, he would be taking over the job. Having no Quickbooks experience, he was not understanding what he was seeing, and there were still items I intended to review and correct or reclassify. I, stupidly, assumed, once they were done being consumed by initial construction and getting the business off the ground, we would meet and iron out any details. They did not understand the mass amount of work that had grown, and were unavailable for months. Once he became available and wanted to take the job over, he became accusatory and irate with the manner that I handled input, and threatened not to pay my final bill. I ended up leaving before the job was complete or cleaned up. At this stage, I was getting nasty emails from them. However, after sending instructions explaining how I did the input and why, I received an email thanking me for my services and a check for the time owed. I then received amiable emails from my friend, and put the incident behind me. However, I recently received another nasty email stating a double entry (most likely due to double paperwork as their manner of providing information was a complete mess) and I am wondering if I need to do something to protect myself or seek legal counsel. The majority of the "errors" they are seeing are legitimate items that needed to be corrected due to duplicate or inaccurate paperwork, which I was aware of and in the process of correcting. However, I am wondering if they seek legal counsel, what I will need to do for myself. Any advice/input is greatly appreciated.
Recently I was doing bookkeeping/office support for 3 years for a friend. The business grew exponentially, and went from 2 hours a week maintaining finances on an excel spreadsheet among other office tasks, to setting up and building Quickbooks files for vendors, customers, items, inventory and services over the last 6 months. They did not want me to work more than 2 or so hours a week and constantly told me they could not afford more. I did the bare minimum in that time frame, but the amount of work grew tremendously, they were never able to discuss my tasks with them, and actually told me at one time "not to come to them with every little thing on my mind." I had been sending email updates, and continued to do so, assuming they would want to be kept abreast of what I was spending my time doing. After a number of months, the job was literally impossible to keep up with, and the tension and stress was unbearable. I gave my notice, and they had me train another employee who did have Quickbooks experience. Two days later, one of the owners told me that instead, he would be taking over the job. Having no Quickbooks experience, he was not understanding what he was seeing, and there were still items I intended to review and correct or reclassify. I, stupidly, assumed, once they were done being consumed by initial construction and getting the business off the ground, we would meet and iron out any details. They did not understand the mass amount of work that had grown, and were unavailable for months. Once he became available and wanted to take the job over, he became accusatory and irate with the manner that I handled input, and threatened not to pay my final bill. I ended up leaving before the job was complete or cleaned up. At this stage, I was getting nasty emails from them. However, after sending instructions explaining how I did the input and why, I received an email thanking me for my services and a check for the time owed. I then received amiable emails from my friend, and put the incident behind me. However, I recently received another nasty email stating a double entry (most likely due to double paperwork as their manner of providing information was a complete mess) and I am wondering if I need to do something to protect myself or seek legal counsel. The majority of the "errors" they are seeing are legitimate items that needed to be corrected due to duplicate or inaccurate paperwork, which I was aware of and in the process of correcting. However, I am wondering if they seek legal counsel, what I will need to do for myself. Any advice/input is greatly appreciated.