​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.

Cash-strapped startups need to be judicious with how they spend their money on everything from operating expenses to hiring costs. When there is just not enough room in the budget to pay an accountant market value for their experience, a startup may need to get creative with their overall compensation package, rethink their “ideal candidate” profile, and potentially even consider outsourcing as an option (at least temporarily).

This conversation expresses the quandary that nonprofit organizations deal with every day – they understand the importance of good financial management, but they also realize that getting funding to invest more in this area is going to be an uphill battle. As a result, they need a cost-effective way to hire a nonprofit accountant or find accounting services on a budget. 

Every day we talk to business owners and CEOs that are worried about how their company is doing financially, but recently there has been an uptick in uncertainty around the metrics they use to evaluate their performance as well. The trend towards questioning whether the business is measuring the right things or enough things is growing. More and more business leaders are asking things like:
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• “Do I have enough information to understand how well we’re really doing?”
• “If there was a problem, would we know early on so we could take the right steps before the problem got too bad?”
• “Are the metrics we are reporting on truly meaningful to the success of the business?”
• “Are we using the right benchmarks to evaluate our performance relative to industry averages and key competitors?”
• “Do we really know where the money is going?”

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.