Accounting controls every small business should have

Internal controls are the routines that make errors and fraud hard to commit and easy to spot. For a small company the essentials are: no single person handles a transaction from start to finish, payments are approved, cash and bank balances are checked against the books every month, closed months cannot be changed, and the owner reviews who changed what.

The checklist

• Separate duties: the person who records an invoice should not be the one who approves or pays it. In a very small team, the owner approves.
• Approve payments above a set amount, in writing or in the system.
• Count the cash box by surprise and compare it with the cashbox ledger.
• Reconcile every bank account with the bank statement every month.
• Number documents in sequence and investigate gaps.
• Close each month once it is reviewed, so nobody can post into it later.
• Correct posted entries by reversal, never by editing or deleting them.
• Give each user only the permissions their job needs, and remove access the day someone leaves.
• Review the audit trail regularly: who created, changed or deleted what, and when.

Why it matters even when you trust your team

Most losses in small companies come from honest mistakes that nobody noticed for months, not from fraud. Controls protect the people who keep the books as much as the owner: when every change is recorded and every month is reconciled, a question about a number can be answered in minutes instead of turning into suspicion.