Who does what, and who approves it.
Written rules are what let a finance function survive a resignation. Without them the process lives in one head and leaves with it.
Who this is for
- Your finance process exists, but only in one person's memory.
- Approvals happen by WhatsApp and nobody can reconstruct who agreed what.
- You are hiring into finance and have nothing to hand the new person.
How it runs
- We map how the work moves today, including the parts nobody documented.
- The month-end close is written down as a sequence with owners and dates.
- An approval matrix: who can commit what, and who signs it off.
- The gaps we found, with a corrective list in priority order.
What is included.
- Setting up the accounts department
- Finance SOP writing
- Workflow and process mapping
- Month-end close process design
- Expense, purchase, payable and receivable rules
- Approval and responsibility matrix
- Internal control design
- Process gap review and improvement
- A chart of accounts that maps to VAT and TDS reporting from the start
What gets written down, and why that order.
We start by mapping how the work moves today, including the parts nobody documented, because the written process and the real one are almost never the same and it is the real one that has the holes in it.
Then the month end close becomes a sequence with owners and dates, and approvals become a matrix: who can commit what, and who signs it off. Approvals that live in WhatsApp cannot be reconstructed, and the moment somebody asks you to reconstruct one is exactly the moment it matters.
The piece people underestimate
- The chart of accounts is built to map to VAT and TDS reporting from the start.
- Getting that wrong does not announce itself. It shows up as somebody rearranging the same figures by hand every reporting period, forever, and nobody costing that time.
- Expense, purchase, payable and receivable rules written as rules rather than as habits, so a new person can follow them.
- A gap review with a corrective list in priority order, because a list of forty findings with no order is the same as no list.
Work we have done, and what changed.
These are engagements of our United States practice, not Bangladesh clients, and the client names are withheld. They are here because they are the standard your work in Dhaka is done to.
From everything routed through the founder to a team that runs itself
The founder was still approving every hire, running every client call and answering every internal question. There was no operating rhythm, no clear ownership and nothing written down.
Documented the core processes, handed ownership to team leads, put in a project management system the company actually used, and coached two senior hires into managing.
The team executes without the founder in the middle of it, and the two new managers were effective inside ninety days.
Before you call.
How long does this take?
It depends on how much of the process exists only in one person's memory, which is what we find out first by mapping how the work actually moves rather than how it is supposed to.
What does an approval matrix actually change?
It puts in writing who can commit money, up to what, and who signs it off. Approvals that live in WhatsApp cannot be reconstructed later, and that is exactly when somebody asks.
Do we need to change software for this?
Not necessarily. The chart of accounts usually does need work, because it should map to VAT and TDS reporting from the start rather than being rearranged every time a return is due.
Is this one-off or ongoing?
One-off by design. You end with the close written down as a sequence with owners and dates, and a corrective list in priority order. If you want us to run the close afterwards, that is the monthly bookkeeping service.
More general questions are answered on the contact page.
Get a free review of your accounts.
Thirty minutes, no charge. We say honestly whether we can help, and what it would cost.