Let’s talk about accountability in your business practices. As your business grows you inevitably will need to add people to your team. This is a healthy part of business. For a team to be efficient and function at its highest level of effectiveness, procedures and processes need to be developed and put into place. A very integral part of these operating processes and procedures is accountability, especially in your financial procedures. No matter how much you may trust someone, you need to have accountability in place. Accountability protects EVERYONE involved. Yes, accountability protects you as the business owner, but it also protects the employee or contractor that is serving your business.

How do I put accountability into place you ask. Here are my top ways to add that accountability to your financial procedures in no particular order.

1.    Have an electronic platform for record keeping. Most bookkeeping platforms keep an audit of every time a transaction is edited including date time and user. This is helpful in the event of records being tampered with.

2.    Every person that has access to the digital records has their own user. This serves several purposes. If things are being done incorrectly its easy to tell who needs the training. Also, each person’s digital fingerprints are left each time a transaction is entered, edited, or deleted.

3.    Every person that needs access to bank accounts has their own user and password. In today’s world of technology and ease of banking, it could become easy to get sloppy with who signs in how. Even if your bank charges a small fee per user, its worth it for the “fingerprint” trail that follows. Your bank can tell you what user authorized a money transfer or sent a check etc. for each transaction, in the case of suspicious activity.

4.    Get a separate credit card for each person that needs buying power. Again, the credit card keeps track of what card makes each transaction. This creates accountability and helps the bookkeeping person to know who to ask questions if there is a missing receipt.

5.    The persons that receive, count and deposit cash should be different than the persons who reconcile the cash receipts and the amount deposited.

6.    The person entering bills and cutting the checks should be different than the person responsible for signing the checks. Signing power of checks really should only be held by owners, or CFO’s.

As an accountant I build relationships with my clients, I earn their trust. Even having earned their trust I REQUIRE these accountability procedures to be in place. I do this to continue to build trust, protect my client, and protect myself.

If you realize that you need to implement accountability in your financial procedures, RUN don’t walk. Evaluate the current procedures and determine where to create the check points, create the checkpoints and then present them to your team. When presenting to your team, inspire them first. Explain how this protects them even more than it protects you. This is for their ease of mind. Most people will appreciate having these accountability checks in place.