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Maintaining Good Accounting Controls
✦ Train employees in the use of QuickBooks. You should train employees
to use QuickBooks if you have a business of any size for two basic reasons:
• Someone who knows how to use QuickBooks is less likely to make
inadvertent errors. QuickBooks isn’t difficult to use, but neither is
QuickBooks something that you can learn willy-nilly with no help.
Some transactions are pretty tricky, particularly for certain busi-
nesses. So, if you can, it makes good sense to provide some employ-
ees with help or training or both. Those resources let people more
comfortably and more accurately use QuickBooks features to build
financial information that lets you better manage your business.
• Messy accounting records camouflage employee theft. Often, one of
the things you see when employee theft happens is really messed-
up accounting records. For that reason, you can find yourself in a
situation where poorly trained employees create a messy account-
ing system that enables theft by perhaps one of those employees
or some other employee. So training not only means more accurate
accounting records, but also that you’re less likely to have an envi-
ronment conducive to theft or embezzlement.
✦ Manage your QuickBooks accounting system. I’m sorry to report that
many business owners don’t view the accounting system as anything
more than a tool to produce invoices and paychecks and information
required for the annual tax return. Unfortunately, that distant relation-
ship with the accounting system means that business owners often don’t
feel much need to actively manage what happens with the accounting
system.
In my opinion — er, an opinion based on more than 25 years of experi-
ence working as a CPA — this attitude is wrong. An accounting system
should be a tool that you use to better manage your business. And it can
be that. But if it’s going to be a tool for better managing your business,
you need to manage the system. In other words, I respectfully suggest
that you take responsibility for ensuring that employees are trained
to do the things that protect your accounting system (such as backing
up the data file) and that you ensure that they complete appropriate
accounting procedures on a monthly and annual basis (such as sending
out all invoices, reconciling bank accounts, cleaning up messy transac-
tions, and so forth). I don’t think this management responsibility needs
to be a heavy one. You can rather easily make sure that people are doing
the sorts of things they are supposed to be doing by creating some
simple checklists. Table 1-1 shows a sample monthly accounting to-do
list. Table 1-2 shows a sample annual accounting to-do list. You can use
these as starting points for constructing your own list of things that the
accounting clerk or office manager must do every month or at the end of
every year.
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