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Controls a small team can actually run.

Most control frameworks are written for companies with forty people in finance. With three, the question is narrower and more useful: which handful of controls would actually have caught the thing that went wrong, and can one person run them without the month taking twice as long.

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Where it usually goes wrong

One person can start and finish a payment

The most common gap we find, and the one with the largest downside.

Approvals happen in conversation

Everyone remembers agreeing to it. Nothing records who, or when, or how much.

The trail breaks at the spreadsheet

A number is adjusted outside the ledger and the reason lives in somebody head.

What we do about it

What an engagement includes depends on scope. These are the parts that come up most.

Separate who does from who approves

Sized to the team you have, not to the team a framework assumes.

Approvals that leave a record

In the system that already holds the transaction, so the evidence is where the auditor looks.

A documented trail end to end

Every adjustment traceable from the statement back to the source, with the reason attached.

What we have written about it

Running a Financial Controls AuditRead it → How to Run a Clean Audit TrailRead it → Handling a Financial Audit as a StartupRead it →

Frequently asked questions

Do you perform audits?

No, and we cannot. A statutory audit is the work of a licensed CPA firm. We get the books, the trail and the schedules into the state where an audit goes smoothly, and we work with the auditors through it.

Is this worth doing before an audit is scheduled?

Usually yes. Controls put in after an auditor asks are controls with no history behind them, and history is most of what they are checking.

How much slower does this make the month?

Done properly, not much. Most of the cost is deciding the rules once. Running them is a few minutes a transaction.

Other things we get called about

A month-end close that lands on a date Revenue recorded the way a diligence reader expects Several entities, one set of numbers that ties out Ready before somebody asks to look See all →

Tell us what the situation is.

We will say plainly whether this is work we should be doing for you, and what it would cost.

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