At Charter Tax, we realise that business people generally want to be concerned with running their business, not necessarily with running their finance department. However, without a good finance department, one cannot run a good business!
Particularly for smaller businesses, or low head-count businesses, one must question whether it is really sensible to entrust the whole of the finances of that business into the hands of one single key employee (in-house accountant). For example, what if the in-house accountant:
- Makes a mistake? (who will review their work to notice this?)
- Worse still, perpetrates a fraud?
- Is trustworthy but actually just isn’t that good and so doesn’t put the right systems in place and lets tax bulls unwittingly build up?
- Is good but then is simply off sick?
When designing the appropriate internal controls for a business, division of responsibilities is key and sometimes this just isn’t possible in a business with an accounts team of one. That’s where we come in.
After all, outsourcing one’s IT requirements is commonplace. Most businesses don’t have the in-house knowledge of server systems and the like to do all of their IT in-house. Indeed, we outsource our own IT to a specialist IT firm (we understand accountancy software packages but we can’t fix a faulty server!). A business should do what it is good at.