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.

When your business is growing and requires additional capital to keep it moving in the right direction, it will need to decide how to come by that funding. This is a complicated decision that can benefit substantially from the expertise that an experienced financial leader like a CFO or Controller can provide to the business’s owner or CEO. But, regardless of which avenue a business takes, it will need to be prepared to open itself up to scrutiny by funders.

Companies looking for funding need to have the right essentials in place to land the money they are hoping to secure. Whether the funding will come from a bank loan, grant, angel investor, VC or private equity firm, corporate investor, or other type of financier, applying requires the right kind of financial planning and preparation. Simply put, you will need to not only have your financial house in order but be able to prove it! This is where your accounting team is instrumental in the process. 

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? 

As accounting consultants, we have seen AI usage increase dramatically over the last five years across daily accounting activities throughout organizations of all sizes. So, where is AI most widely used in bookkeeping and accounting these days?
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When it comes to AI in accounting, A/R and A/P augmentation has proven to be the low hanging fruit. As accounting technology has grown more sophisticated machines have been tasked with doing these types of repetitive functions that have traditionally bogged organizations down with manual work. With A/R and A/P already being powered by AI, what can we expect next?

​Usually, we discuss more specifically focused accounting and bookkeeping topics to share in-depth industry knowledge with our readers. However, today we’re going back to the basics to answer a fundamental question: “What does an accounting services provider do?”

​Simply put, an accounting provider does less than full-time work. This work can be either ongoing part-time work or short-term work (which includes interim engagements and project-based work). What does that entail exactly? 

​Research shows that today’s bookkeepers and accountants are making mistakes as their workloads have increased due to economic volatility and newly enacted regulations. 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!

At the end of last year, the popular accounting resource Accounting Today published an interview with 100 of accounting’s top minds where they asked the simple question, “What is the most important issue currently facing the accounting profession?” and recorded their responses. Their answers ranged across topics such as staffing shortages, independent audits, AI, financial reporting, private equity, and technological advancements. If you get a chance to read it, you should! There’s some great insight to glean. 
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Since we employ a vast network of consulting accountants across Washington, Oregon, and Colorado, we asked our consultants to do something similar. However, instead of having them focus on what’s important right now, we asked them to be more forward-thinking in their responses. We posed the question, “What will be the most important topics in accounting this year?” These were some of their responses: 

The speed at which AI is being introduced into our everyday lives is head spinning! Recent discussions of using AI in the accounting field are all over the map. Some say it’s a huge time saver, while others say it’s potentially disastrous (some will even spout both opinions in the same sentence). Since the industry seems so conflicted about this hot topic, let’s explore the potential advantages and possible pitfalls of using AI in accounting. 

​Maturity in business acumen comes from knowing what to prioritize for the greatest return. Whether you are handling it in-house or outsourcing your accounting activities, knowing where to devote limited resources is crucial for good decision making.

​But how do you know where to start? What’s the most critical thing that absolutely needs to be done first? What will offer significant benefits down the road when more resources become available? And what would be nice to do eventually, but isn’t essential? And what should you avoid doing entirely?
Obviously, there’s not a single right answer to these questions because every organization has different business needs. However, there’s a framework that you can use to make these kinds of decisions, regardless of individual circumstances, so you know what to do now, soon, later, and never. 

There is skepticism around whether special skills are required to recruit well, how much experience plays a part in the process, and if the benefit justifies the cost. ​