Business problems/Payments & controls
“Could money be leaving without anyone questioning it?”
Not because anyone is dishonest — usually because the business grew and the habits did not. An invoice gets paid twice. A supplier is set up on a Friday afternoon. One person both enters and approves because there is only one person.
What you are looking at
Every payment made in one month — 36 of them, $174,000 — put through five checks. Not a sample of twenty, which is what a manual review can realistically manage.
Turn checks on and off, move the thresholds, and see what changes.
How an engagement runs, in five steps.
The business below is constructed so its figures can be shown openly. The sequence, the files requested and the deliverables are exactly what a real engagement involves.
The bookkeeper left after nine years. Handing over, the owner realised nobody outside that one person had looked at a payment in a very long time, and had no idea whether that mattered.
One month of payment data — date, supplier, amount, reference, who entered it, who approved it — plus the supplier list with setup dates, and a note of who is allowed to approve what.
What is on this page: five checks run across every payment in the month, what each one found, the value involved, and where the findings cluster by supplier.
Everything below this section is that analysis, live. Change any assumption and every figure and conclusion moves with it.
In the example: $10,600 recovered from payments made twice. Approval changed from per-invoice to per-supplier-per-week, which ended the splitting. The owner now signs off the weekly payment run.
This page is roughly 5% of that engagement — the slice that can be published, because the business is invented. The rest is at the bottom of this page.
What a real engagement hands you
Not a web page. Working documents built on your own figures, in whatever form is easiest to actually use:
- A written findings report — what was found, what it costs, what to do, with every calculation shown
- Charts and tables built for the specific decision, not a standard template
- The underlying schedules, so anyone on your side can check or take over the work
- Interactive versions where a decision has assumptions worth testing yourself
- PDF and Word files you can forward to a bank, a partner or your accountant
- A ranked action plan with an amount, an owner and a date against each item
All of it on your real data, and yours to keep.
How many questions each check raised
The pattern matters more than the count. One payment made twice is an accident. A supplier producing three invoices a week just below your approval limit is a process telling you something.
April payments
| Date | Supplier | Amount | Entered / approved | What was noticed |
|---|
A question is not an accusation. It is a payment your process should have stopped to look at, and did not.
Where the questions cluster
Value of flagged payments by supplier. Clustering is the useful signal — it points at a relationship or a habit rather than a one-off slip.
What an owner actually does with this
Get the money back
Payments made twice are a straight refund — usually the fastest return anyone gets from a finance project, and it needs one phone call.
Fix the limit
If invoices bunch just under your approval limit, the limit is not working. Approve by supplier per week instead of by invoice and the behaviour disappears.
Add a second pair of eyes
In a small team one person often does everything. That is normal — it just needs something alongside it, like the owner reviewing the weekly payment run.
Make it a habit
The value is not one report. It is these checks running every month, so questions surface while they can still be answered.