The biggest challenge we hear about every day is being behind in ongoing accounting activities!
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We hear it over and over, “We’re so behind on _________. I feel like we’re never going to catch up because we just don’t have the people or time to do it all!” You can fill in that blank with almost any bookkeeping or accounting activity and it would describe the kinds of conversations we have with prospective clients. Whether it’s payables, receivables, close, reconciliations, reimbursements, payroll, or reporting, we have heard it all!

​When we talk to prospective clients, we’re always amazed at the types of myths that are going around out there about working with an accounting services provider. After almost two decades of doing accounting work for clients, we’ve heard it all from the silly to the downright bizarre. But throughout it all, the same few myths have stuck around over the years. So, we’re taking the time to address them now to set the record straight. 

Think you won’t need interim accounting help this year? Think again!

It’s time to recognize the fact that your accountant probably won’t be around forever. With the trend of accounting professionals changing roles every 3-5 years and the current accounting exodus that the industry is facing, the odds of your current accountant staying in their role for the next 3 years is only moderately likely, the next 5 years are very unlikely, and the next 10 years is almost certainly not going to happen. That means you need to be prepared to utilize an interim accounting services company sooner rather than later. Don’t put off for next year what you should address this year!

Starting out in public accounting as a fresh-faced graduate, I naively thought there was a reasonable chance I would find fraud as part of an audit. Assessing fraud risk was always part of the prep work, but after years of auditing, no fraud had turned up. Turns out I shouldn’t have been surprised. 

The 2024 Report to the Nations by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) sheds light on the persistent threat of occupational fraud. According to the report, only about 3% of occupational fraud is actually discovered by external audit. Turns out that employee tipsters are responsible for the lion’s share of fraud detection.

This proved true in my experience. The one real instance of fraud I ran across wasn’t discovered through the audit process. I can’t even remember if the organization had been audited before. In this case, the fraud had already been uncovered by the organization and now they wanted to understand its scope.
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Turns out that the Executive Director of a nonprofit was submitting invoices from a fictitious vendor and also turning in personal expenses for reimbursement. This resulted in about $250,000 in stolen funds. The mind-blowing part was that this person had stolen money from a previous employer! The former employer hadn’t charged the individual, probably to avoid bad publicity, nor had they been contacted during the ED’s hiring process. Learning from their error, the nonprofit did bring charges this time around. When the culprit was located, they were in another state already working at yet another nonprofit.