As a business owner, you want to know you can trust your team to work well for you and your business. Introducing a few simple processes can make it much harder for an employee to abuse your trust.

Housekeeping

Be sure you’re documenting all your systems. Good systems are easy to understand and make it hard to hide things. For instance, when you refund a customer, make sure it’s signed off by a manager or yourself and recorded somewhere central. Checklists can make a system easier for staff to understand and follow.

Here are some tips to safeguard your business and keep your trusted relationships strong.

Have systems in place to require you to routinely look at where your money’s going or to sign off on key transactions.

Monitoring

Do you have regular reporting? Things to look for are unusual customer refunds or credits, a spike in new suppliers or payments to existing ones. Do your sales look right? Is there a dip in cash sales?

Know what benchmarks other businesses in your industry are hitting. Compare your profit to overhead ratios with theirs and question any inconsistencies.

Buddy systems

Start by red flagging any systems where only one signatory is required or only one person oversees income and expenses. Make it part of the monthly routine to have more than one person look at the bank statements. Consider whether training ‘buddies’ to share key financial responsibilities might make it harder to siphon off funds unseen.

Buddy systems can strengthen your succession plans and take pressure off when a signatory is on leave. Also, ironically, people engaging in dishonest activity tend not to take holidays, because they know someone else will be performing their duties and they could be found out.

We can help you create a risk assessment for your business and also help strengthen your systems if needed.