No company, no matter how small, should only have one person manage the books.

"She hid her theft by creating dummy bills for suppliers and paying the money directly into her account."

If I'm reading this correctly, fake bills were created and entered as expenses, which were then paid from the company bank account.

If so, wouldn't the losses have shown up on the income statement? That would mean that the owner had the same amount of money he thought he had, but less than he should have had.

Likely some details are missing from the article.

The main damage to the business was the revealing of the fraud and driving away the people who were going to buy it.

Nobody is going to stick around for years waiting for court proceedings to finish up to complete a purchase of a small business - they’ll just find something else.

> Mr Zeuschner has calculated that Clerke would have put a staggering $20 million through the poker machines at St Marys over the 17 years she was stealing money from his business.

Perhaps she was repatriating the winnings, and so the signal of her losses were masked over time.

$3.7m over 17 years = $218,000 per year.