Gas stations are encouraging it. Many Main Street SMBs, local restaurants and designer boutiques are doing it for the first time. Fitness clubs have been doing it for a while — but some have gotten into trouble lately for doing it when they shouldn’t have. Uber and Starbucks pioneered it. Digital wallets and apps only work this way.

Among the numerous ways, small businesses have been affected by the global pandemic, the sudden race to launch online operations has been among the most profound — and may ultimately be among the most long-lasting changes to the SMB community.
Banks, FinTechs and small business solution providers have rallied around the effort to ease the digitization transition. But while there are many tools at entrepreneurs’ disposal to make the shift, it can still be difficult to draw the most logical and frictionless roadmap to business model digitization that will alter the course of many small businesses’ futures long after the pandemic.

Approximately $185,000 worth of payroll fraud hit a Minnesota company, with local reports noting that a bookkeeper allegedly manipulated payroll data to overpay her salary. The scam reportedly lasted about five years, and the former bookkeeper has now been charged with felony theft.