​The role you need depends on your business needs, so let’s look at common business triggers that most likely require needing the next level of financial role, and what kind of activities and responsibilities each role typically includes. We’ll start with bookkeeper and work our way up to Chief Financial Officer (CFO). 

As fractional accountants, we have experience with a wide array of “less than full-time” accounting engagements ranging from ongoing part-time work and extra assistance during busy periods to short-term project work and interim roles while a new accountant is hired. Of these, interim work is notoriously underutilized, which is disappointing because it is an area where bringing in help expeditiously can have a huge impact.

A resource offered in partnership between The ASP Team and CFO Selections

​One commonality among our businesses at The ASP Team and CFO Selections is that we often talk to business leaders that aren’t sure which kind of accounting role they need. They typically understand the duties they would like the person to perform and the deliverables they expect to receive, but they aren’t sure what to call the role exactly. Without the proper title it makes it difficult to hire into the role or find an accounting services company to provide exactly what they need.

Sometimes clients will come to us at The ASP Team saying that they need a “bookkeeper” as a catch-all phrase for someone doing any kind of accounting work but what they are really looking for is something more – an Accountant, Senior Accountant, or even Controller. Similarly, sometimes clients will come to us at CFO Selections saying that they need a “CFO” as a catch-all phrase for someone doing more advanced accounting work or leading an accounting team but what they actually need is something less – a Controller, Accounting Manager, or Senior Accountant. How do you know which you need? 

​Research shows that bookkeepers and accountants are making more mistakes as their workload has increased over the last few years. The data also shows that the more capacity constrained accounting professionals are, the more likely they are to make data errors on manual work and miss issues when conducting regular reviews on accounting records.

And while this certainly does not mean accounting professionals across the board are doing poor work, even the best accountants are feeling the pressure. As their time continues to be squeezed and their responsibilities expanded, good accountants are finding that they need to work even harder to maintain the top-notch work that they are doing. The result is an environment more conducive to burnout and errors regardless of the integrity and work ethic that they bring to the role.
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If your books are messy due to overworked bookkeeping and accounting staff or turnover in those roles, you need to be able to figure out what needs to be fixed, understand how to fix it, and take a proactive approach to avoid future accounting issues!

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.

I have a lot of respect for accounting leaders who take pride in the way they manage every aspect of their company. 

Let’s take a look at a few reasons why maximizing efficiency in your accounting department is important.

When you’re searching for an accounting provider what should you look for exactly? What’s a true need versus a want? What is worth paying more for if you can get it? Obviously, every organization will have unique needs to consider, but we’ve put together our top five list of accounting provider must-haves to serve as a quick guide for business owners:

Do you really need to document accounting policies and procedures, or are there times when formalized accounting procedures just aren’t necessary? The answer is probably what you’re expecting, but don’t really want to hear.

Formal accounting policies are always necessary! (And we’re not just saying that because we’re accountants.)
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Many small business owners think they don’t need to write down their accounting processes and procedures because with limited staff they may only have one person doing everything bookkeeping-related and that person doesn’t need to tell themselves what they do regularly. However, even small companies open themselves up to significant risk if they don’t document their accounting policies because doing so is a fundamental element of doing business regardless of the size of the organization. 

​Typically, it’s followed by questions like:

• How can I tell if the team has the right skillset to do the job we need done?
• Do they have the resources needed to do their jobs effectively?
• Should we hire more personnel to lend additional expertise or bear the workload better?
• Should we make a change to our accounting policies or procedures?
• Is our accounting software helping or hurting the problems we’re experiencing?

These last few years have created unprecedented demands for the accounting and finance teams of small companies (and larger ones, too!). As a result, we have seen many clients come to us looking for assistance in getting their accounting tasks caught up to enable both internal and external reporting.
 
Let’s take a look at what kinds of requirements exist this year and who should be responsible for meeting them!